# ORM Designer and Ruby ORM

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/orm-designer-and-ruby-orm/193196>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [August 12, 2010, 9:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/orm-designer-and-ruby-orm/193196 "2010-08-12T21:35:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![ludekvodicka](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/d78d45/32.png) [@ludekvodicka](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ludekvodicka)\
**Post date:** [August 12, 2010, 9:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/orm-designer-and-ruby-orm/193196/1 "2010-08-12T21:35:15Z")

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Hello,

My name is Ludek Vodicka and I’m the main developer of ORM Designer tool  
([http://www.orm-designer.com](http://www.orm-designer.com)).

During last months several people asked us if we could create a support  
for RoR ORM in ORM Designer. Today we are deciding and planning next  
features and considering an implementation of your framework.

ORM Designer serves to design ORM model definitions. Instead of writing  
definitions to several text files, you will be able to design your model  
in one place and then export it.

I want to ask whole community if our tool could help you with your work  
and if the tool seems to be useful for you. Currently we support several  
PHP ORM frameworks and have lot of positive feedbacks from our users.

I believe that in cooperation with the community we could build powerful  
tool for all RoR developers.

Please feel free to reply to this post with any suggestion or question,  
or send me an email to removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid.

Best regards  
Ludek Vodicka

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**Author:** ![ludekvodicka](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/d78d45/32.png) [@ludekvodicka](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ludekvodicka)\
**Post date:** [August 12, 2010, 10:15pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/orm-designer-and-ruby-orm/193196/2 "2010-08-12T22:15:24Z")

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Ludek Vodicka wrote:

> ORM Designer serves to design ORM model definitions. Instead of writing  
> definitions to several text files, you will be able to design your model  
> in one place and then export it.

I think you’ll find that your tool is designed to solve a problem that  
doesn’t exist in Ruby on Rails. One of the primary advantages of  
ActiveRecord is convention over configuration. There is not a bunch of  
text files storing model configurations.

Here is a basic ActiveRecord model class:

class Post \< ActiveRecord::Base  
has\_many :comments  
end

And that is all there is to it. ActiveRecord will get everything it  
needs to know from the database. There is no configuration file.

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**Author:** ![ludekvodicka](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/d78d45/32.png) [@ludekvodicka](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ludekvodicka)\
**Post date:** [August 13, 2010, 4:27am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/orm-designer-and-ruby-orm/193196/3 "2010-08-13T04:27:37Z")

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On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 10:15:24PM +0200, Robert W. wrote:

> Ludek Vodicka wrote:
> 
> > ORM Designer serves to design ORM model definitions. Instead of writing  
> > definitions to several text files, you will be able to design your model  
> > in one place and then export it.
> 
> I think you’ll find that your tool is designed to solve a problem that  
> doesn’t exist in Ruby on Rails. One of the primary advantages of  
> ActiveRecord is convention over configuration. There is not a bunch of  
> text files storing model configurations.  
> […]  
> And that is all there is to it. ActiveRecord will get everything it  
> needs to know from the database. There is no configuration file.

That’s true for ActiveRecord, but Rails3 supports much more than AR.  
DataMapper, for example, could benefit from such a tool.

–Greg

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ludekvodicka](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/d78d45/32.png) [@ludekvodicka](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ludekvodicka)\
**Post date:** [August 13, 2010, 9:01am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/orm-designer-and-ruby-orm/193196/4 "2010-08-13T09:01:52Z")

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Thank you both for your replies. I will look to AR and DM too.

If anyone has another idea or comment about ORMD and RoR, please feel  
free to send me your opinion.