Re: wither dbdi-dev?

On Tue, Nov 01, 2005 at 05:34:23PM -0800, Darren Duncan wrote:
> When looking on nntp.perl.org today for a different reason, I 
> discovered the dbi2-dev list, which appearently was started on August 
> 31st, two months after the "DBI v2 - The Plan and How You Can Help" 
> multi-list discussion.
> 
> (It was a surprise because I didn't recall seeing any announcement of 
> this list's creation on the other usual forums.)

It sort of mumbled its way into existence. I didn't want to make a big
splash initially as I felt it would be better to keep the number for
voices small for the very early kind of rough design work I was thinking
of at the time.

Welcome aboard Darren!

> Is this list meant to replace the older dbdi-dev list that was 
> created in February of 2004 and then stalled pending necessary Parrot 
> updates?  From a quick survey of this new list's content, that would 
> appear to be the case.

I don't think so. The DBDI is the Parrot-level API. DBI2 is the Perl6 API
layered over DBDI.

They're different. But just how different is very much an open question.

Now Rob Kinyon has added dynamic role composition for Perl5 in his
Perl6::Roles module[1] I'm thinking that the next step should be
releasing a "DBI42" module using it to (very thinly) wrap my JDBC module.
Ideally DBI42 would serve the same purpose for DBI2 as Pugs serves
for Perl6: A playground to explore ideas.

Basically DBI42 can start out as a 'transparent' wrapper for JDBC
(so DBI42 is simply the JDBC API). I'll happily give out committer
rights to anyone why wants to hack DBI42 to be "better than JDBC".

Coming back to the question of DBDI... if you imagine a line with
raw JDBC at one end and DBI42 at the other, then the DBDI API will be
somewhere on that line. At this point I don't think there's much
benefit in trying to identify where - we don't have a line yet.

Tim.

[1] a merging of Class::Role and Class::Roles:
http://search.cpan.org/~rkinyon/Perl6-Roles/lib/Perl6/Roles.pm