[Openinteract-dev] [ANNOUNCE] SPOPSx::Ginsu (inheritance for SPOPS)

[Ray Z. <rz...@co...>]

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     SPOPSx-Ginsu-0.57.tar.gz

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SPOPSx::Ginsu (which began its life as ESPOPS) stands for SPOPS 
eXtension for Generalized INheritance SUpport. It is a Perl object 
oriented persistence tool. To put it in the context of the other tools 
summarized at (http://poop.sourceforge.net/) it essentially adds some 
of Tangram's functionality to SPOPS.

SPOPS::DBI implements an inherited persistence mechanism for classes 
whose objects are each stored as a row in a single database table. Each 
class has its own table and all of the persistent fields are stored in 
that table. Ginsu extends this implementation to handle subclassing of 
such objects, including polymorphic retrieval. The fields of a given 
object are stored across several database tables, one for each parent 
class with persistent fields. A Ginsu object is simply an SPOPS::DBI 
object stored across multiple database tables.

Ginsu and SPOPS also differ in the usage style. With standard SPOPS, 
classes are typically created at runtime from configuration files and 
any code for the classes is imported from a separate code class. With 
Ginsu, each class looks like a standard Perl class, with its own .pm 
file containing the class's code. The BEGIN block includes variables 
containing the SPOPS configuration data for the class. To use a Ginsu 
class, you simply 'use' it as you would any other Perl class.

Currently, Ginsu has only been tested with MySQL, since that's what we 
use. It should be fairly easy to make it work with any database SPOPS 
supports, but that has not become a priority for my own use.

Any help with any of the following development tasks is appreciated.
  - making Ginsu database independent
  - fixing some of the SPOPS functionality that we've broken or ignored 
in
    Ginsu (security, lazy loading, database independence, strict fields)
  - integrating Ginsu functionality into the SPOPS core
  - implementing the enhanced object relationship configuration

--
Ray Zimmerman
Director, Laboratory for Experimental Economics and Decision Research
428-B Phillips Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
phone:  (607) 255-9645       fax: (815) 377-3932