PUBLIC MARKS with tags activerecord & Elixir

About Elixir is a declarative layer on top of SQLAlchemy. It is a fairly thin wrapper, which provides the ability to define model objects following the Active Record design pattern, and using a DSL syntax similar to that of the Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord system. Elixir does not intend to replace SQLAlchemy's core features, but instead focuses on providing a simpler syntax for defining model objects when you do not need the full expressiveness of SQLAlchemy's manual mapper definitions. Example Here is a very short model definition example, so that you can see what the syntax look like. For some explanation and more complete examples, please have a look at the tutorial or at the examples page. class Person(Entity): has_field('name', Unicode(255)) has_many('addresses', of_kind='Address') class Address(Entity): has_field('email', String(128)) belongs_to('person', of_kind='Person') History In 2006, Jonathan LaCour discovered the fantastic SQLAlchemy project, and really liked its power and flexibility, but found that in many simple cases he would prefer a simpler and more attractive way to declare his model objects. As a result, Jonathan spent a few hours on a weekend to create the ActiveMapper SQLAlchemy extension. For a weekend's worth of work, it wasn't half bad, and gained a little bit of traction in the wild. But, over time, it became clear that ActiveMapper needed a lot of work to stabilize and become more useful. Later that year, Daniel Haus released his own layer on top of SQLAlchemy, called TurboEntity. TurboEntity solved some of the problems of ActiveMapper, and took a slightly different approach to the problem. TurboEntity also began to gain some ground and it became clear to both Daniel and Jonathan that they needed to work together. Around the same time, Gaëtan de Menten contacted both Jonathan and Daniel to reveal that he had been working on his own layer as well. A few weeks later, all three agreed to work together to create a replacement for TurboEntity and ActiveMapper using their collective experience and knowledge. The Name The Oxford English Dictionary defines Elixir as: "a magical or medicinal potion, a preparation that was supposedly able to change metals into gold, sought by alchemists." The Future The eventual goal of the Elixir project is to become an official SQLAlchemy extension. But, before we submit elixir for inclusion within SQLAlchemy, we want the opportunity to solicit feedback and contributions from users to make sure that we have ironed out any bugs, missing features, syntax changes, or documentation deficiencies.