Stone: Dead-Simple Ruby Data Persistence
Stone is a new Ruby library developed by Nick DeMonner that seems to have got a nice bit of buzz in the last week. It's a data persistence library that provides "plug and play data persistence for any application or framework," and it boasts speed and simplicity. Rather than use a database and an ORM like ActiveRecord, Stone takes care of everything in an abstract manner. Data is "persisted" to files within a directory underneath your app.
The official Stone homepage gives some interesting examples, including replacing ActiveRecord with Stone in a Rails application. It is surprisingly simple, but by its own admission Stone is "extremely immature." It certainly looks well developed though, but if you're already happy with SQLite 3 and ActiveRecord (a surprisingly proficient combination) there might not be any compelling reasons to switch just yet.
April 21, 2008 at 10:00 am
The concept reminds of Prevayler in Java - persisting/marshalling object graphs to the HDD (and cached in memory). I seem to remember that project proving controversial back when it was released (2004?)...
April 21, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Nick's great work aside, can we all agree that "dead-simple", as a phrase, is overused and done, especially when it comes to anything Ruby?
http://www.google.com/search?q=dead+simple+ruby
I'm hoping the marketing and business school folks will adopt it so that developers will shun it forever.
April 22, 2008 at 11:47 am
Maybe 'Super-Easy' Ruby data Persistence instead ?
April 22, 2008 at 9:10 pm
Perhaps no compelling reason... unless, like me, you really hate ActiveSupport and by extension, ActiveRecord.