Object graphs

Guys,

I’m designing an application currently that will ultimately be
implemented
in either Rails or php5 (most likely Rails).

While I’ve coded many PHP (pre-5) applications in the past, OO support
was
so weak that my OO designs were never truly divorced from the
limitations
of the language, thus I never had to consider this problem.

The question is: how does Rails (and how do PHP5’ers now that PHP5 has
good enough OO support to make building large object graphs feasible)
persist large object graphs between requests?

In other words, say I have around 15 model classes where each class is
composed somehow by at least one other in the group, and that some of
these classes are persisted by ORM. On the first request, loading one
particular object might cause objects of all these classes to be either
loaded from the ORM store or instantiated. If the same web user issues a
request two seconds after this one that would require the same objects,
am
I forced to reload everything again, or is there a better way?

I know serialization might work for this, but I’m concerned about
overhead.

Thanks in advance for your help in clarifying this dilemma.

John

Hi,

On Dec 21, 2005, at 8:14 AM, John W. wrote:

Guys,

I’m designing an application currently that will ultimately be
implemented
in either Rails or php5 (most likely Rails).

[snip]

issues a
request two seconds after this one that would require the same
objects, am
I forced to reload everything again, or is there a better way?

This scenario is pretty much exactly why I wrote xampl (first in
Java, then in Lisp, now in Ruby). There is a GPL version on
rubyforge: http://rubyforge.org/projects/xampl/. Well, there’s a
lot more to the ‘why xampl’ than that but anyway…

I’m working (in production but being actively developed) on a
relatively simple application that has something like 42 classes (and
who knows how many instances) that might get dragged in as you
describe. I have a larger application in production that has 120 such
classes, and another with 201. These are all Java applications as it
happens. I also have a Common Lisp application with 49 classes like
that. I’ve only been prototyping in Ruby so far, but I think the
smaller applications (40-49) would be more than feasible in Ruby. I’m
not completely sure how these would translate to tables in
ActiveRecord because I don’t know how many inter-object relationships
are supported by these applications (but there would be a lot,
certainly no less than 3 or 4 per object).

I am just now starting to look at how I might integrate xampl with
Rails. There are a number of possibilities that I can see, the
easiest (you can do this today) is to just use it for the Model but
you’ll lose the whole scaffolding part of Rails. This is an
unpleasant trade-off, and one that I think should be at least
partially addressable through modifications to xampl alone. On the
other hand, I would have a very difficult time using the CRUD
approach (even with all the help Rails provides) with the kinds of
applications I write, so I’d unhappily be willing to give up on the
scaffolding.

As an alternative, you might look into how to use Madeleine with
Rails (instiki does this). This might be a good solution if your
application fits the constraints of Madeleine.

And of course, there could be other solutions. As I say, I’m new to
Rails. I plead ignorance if I’ve ignored anything :slight_smile:

I know serialization might work for this, but I’m concerned about
overhead.

I wouldn’t recommend this. You’d be far further ahead trying to use
the AR model as it now stands, or working with xampl.

Thanks in advance for your help in clarifying this dilemma.

Hmm. I don’t know if I clarified anything :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Bob

John


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Bob H. – blogs at http://www.recursive.ca/hutch/
Recursive Design Inc. – http://www.recursive.ca/
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Hi

Am 21.12.2005 um 14:14 schrieb John W.:

In other words, say I have around 15 model classes where each class is
composed somehow by at least one other in the group, and that some of
these classes are persisted by ORM. On the first request, loading one
particular object might cause objects of all these classes to be
either
loaded from the ORM store or instantiated. If the same web user
issues a
request two seconds after this one that would require the same
objects, am
I forced to reload everything again, or is there a better way?

Of course you could store an object graph in the session but I would
propably try not to do this.

First, you might get huge sessions (i objects * n bytes * m
parallelly logged in users). Second, you would have to care about
synchronization and this is a nontrivial problem IMO. Third,
ActiveRecord is a nice way to edit data in a database object
orientated but its strong point is the tight integration into RoR
rather than being a good ORM layer IMO.

Also consider the “relations cannot be set without updating the
database” problem I described in this ticket: http://
dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/2238 - the ticket also has a proposal for
a change to ActiveRecord that would make such things work. Note that
incorporating the changes proposed there would require much work (and
insight into the internal workings of ActiveRecord) and none of the
RoR core developers has shown any particular interest in this ticket
or commented on it. There seems to be some interest in the community,
though, judging from the number of cc entries.

You might want to reconsider your application design. RoR is not
about managing huge object graphs in memory over simple requests but
about solving your problem with less code. It kind of pushes you into
simplifying a lot. This is a good thing IMO since it makes you see
bloated sections of your design that you might have missed and wasted
time into.

Regards

Manuel H.

Thanks guys…definitely gives me something to look at. The fact that I
got responses at all illustrates what appears to me to be a significant
difference between the PHP and Rails community: in my opinion, the
average
Rails developer is more experienced than the average PHP developer. Now,
I’m stretching it a bit to make this assertion, but I do believe it’s
true. I posted this same question on the #php irc channel and got a
response that was the equivalent of “object graphs? object graphs are
teh
suck”.

To be fair, I probably should’ve posted the question on the php mailing
list. I’m sure there are more experienced folks there.

Thanks again,

John