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Momomoto!

Yesterday and today, I’ve spent most of the time sitting next to Damián Viano (des), feeling 1337 because we are doing exactly the heavily recommended pair-programming thingy with a Rails application that everybody in Debconf is familiar with: We are adding some stuff for our beloved video-team in Pentabarf! Now, Pentabarf is -as we were trying to explain earlier on, amidst angst and frustration- a strange beast: It looks like your regular Rails app. It smells like Rails. But it tastes like Java.
For some reason, the Pentabarf author (who I sincerely expect to meet soon - yes, he is coming to Debconf as well!) decided not to use Rails’ killer app part, the one which has got most interested people into the whole framework, ActiveRecord. For all of the object-relation mapping needs, uses something called Momomoto.
To its defence, Momomoto is a lightweight library. This has the great advantage that, although it completely lacks documentation, its source code is very easy to follow, and it takes just a couple of hours (and forehead-wall bangs) - Much unlike ActiveRecord. But on the down side, as lightweight as the library is, the model it uses is completely suboptimal for many of our (so far really simple) uses. We have a simple view, for example, that runs in at least On^3 (measured in independent DB queries, of course). Going through a different model, it could at least be cut to a much nicer On^2.
Anyway… I’m relieved. The extension the video guys wanted is not that large, and it’s mostly done. It is surely showable by tonight’s meeting (modulo a couple missing bits, of course, but it’s just bits), and will be ready no matter what by tomorrow. I’m just sorry I had to throw des aside, as pair-programming for two days in a row for the best portion of the day is not good for sanity.
Well, neither coming to Debconf is, so whattheheck… ;-) At least I could get a bit of my mail and RL work backlog processed.

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