Nextras Orm is getting more serious with every day. It has already passed 2000 installs per month! That is an exciting number!
The last weekend I, Jan Tvrdík and David Matějka have met to elaborate on Orm’s internal design and to hack some new needed features. We have discussed many topics, including mapper & repository architecture refactoring or support for new RDBMSes (such as MS SQL Server, which support is on the way into Nextras Dbal 3.0).
Finally, we agreed on the following hacking topics:
- Refresh: implementing refresh is not an easy task, mainly because it’s pretty complicated to through the “refresh” consequences out; Therefore we decided to start with the easier possible implementation:
Model::refreshAll()function that will refresh all loaded entities in your identity map. David Matejka was hacking this and it is available in a pull-request. - ICollection operations: another broad topic which should bring you a lot of variability for your collections. This feature should allow you to define special filtering implementations in your mapper layer, however, easily reusable in your collections (repository layer). This Jan Tvrdik’s hacking also includes complex refactoring of collection internals.
- Embeddables: feature available in Doctrine, however, with few important limitations such as no-nullable embeddable. This was my hacking topic and the partial result is in this pull-request and it is waiting for Jan Tvrdik’s topic.
- Mapper & Repository dependency: David Matějka continued with another complex refactoring for mapper, storage reflection, repository and identity map classes. The awesome result is already merged in the master branch.
The next day (on Saturday) Mikuláš Dítě has joined us and hacked “migrations plan” pull-request for save migrations running and merging in Nextras Migrations package.
The hackaton was taking place manGoweb offices. Thank you for the opportunity!
We didn’t finished all our work, but such meeting & hackaton proved that discussing and hacking in person may bring new ideas and information about Orm’s usage that I didn’t know.
All mentioned features are scheduled for 3.0 release. You may also take a look at 3.0 milestone on GitHub. I’d like to release the first 3.0 Release Candidate at the end of June. So the feature freeze should be in the middle of June.
You may help us by testing current master branch and reporting issues, or by enhancing the documentation, which is opensourced directly in the Orm’s repository.