diary at Telent Netowrks

Objections on Rails#

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 18:01:28 +0000

It seems to be pick-on-rails week/month/quarter again. I'm not sure that 3 months and two projects really should qualify me to have an opinion on it, but this is the internet, so here we go anyway.

Recent influences which have provoked these thoughts:

I'm not going to lay into the V and C of Rails here: to be honest, although they seem rather unpretty (my controller's instance variables appear magically in the view? ew) they're perfectly up to the task as long as you don't try to do the heavy lifting in either of those layers. Which is a bad idea anyway. And actually, after writing an entire site including the layouts in Erector (if you don't know Erector, think Markaby), there is a certain pleasure in being able to write the mostly static HTML bits in ... HTML.

No, instead of generalizing that MVC is the problem, I an going to confine myself to the ActiveRecord arena and generalize that M, specifically M built on ORM, is the problem. The two problems.

Here is the first problem. Object-orientated modelling is about defining the responsibilities (or behaviours, if you prefer) of the objects in your system. Object-relational modelling is about specifying their attributes. Except in the trivially simple cases ("an Elf is responsible for knowing what its name is") the two are not the same: you define an Elf with a method which tells him to don his pointy shoes, not with direct access to his feet so you can do it yourself. So that's the first problem: the objects you end up with when you design with ActiveRecord have accessors where their instance variables would be in a sensible universe.

(Compounding this they also have all the AR methods like #find wich in no way correspond to domain requirements, but really I think that's a secondary issue: forcing you to inherit baggage from your ancestors is one thing, but this pattern actively encourages you to create more of it yourself. This is the kind of thing that drives Philip Larkin to poetry)

Here is the second problem. We're wimping out on relations. For the benefit of readers who equate RDMBS with SQL with punishment visited on us by our forebears in 1960s mainframe data processing departments, I'm going to expound briefly on the nature of relational algebra: why it's cool, and what the "object-relational impedance mismatch" really is. It's not about the difference between String and VARCHAR

Digression: a brief guide to relational algebra

A relation is a collection of tuples. A tuple is a collection of named attributes.

(You can map these to SQL database terminology if you put your tuples in a grid with one column per attribute name. Then attribute=column, row=tuple, and relation=table. Approximately, at least)

An operation takes relation(s) as arguments and returns a relation as result. Operators are things like

Here's an example to illustrate for SQL folk: when you write

select a,b,c from foo f join bar b on b.foo_id=f.id where a>1
this is mathematically a cross join of foo with bar, followed by a selection of the rows where b.foo_id=f.id, followed by a projection down to attributes a,b,c, followed by a selection of rows where a>1.

Now here's the important bit:

the tuple isn't in itself a representation of some real-world object: it's an assertion that some object with the given attributes exists.

Why is this important? It makes a difference when we look at operations that throw away data. If Santa has a relation with rows representing two elves with the same name but different shoe sizes, and he projects this relation to remove shoe_size, he doesn't say "oh shit, we can't differentiate those two elves any more, how do we know which is which?", because he doesn't have records of two elves and has never had records of two elves - he has two assertions that at least one elf of that name exists. There might be one or two or n different elves with that name and we've thrown away the information that previously let us deduce there were at least two of them, but we haven't broken our database - we've just deleted data from it. Relational systems fundamentally don't and can't have object identity, because they don't contain objects. They record facts about objects that have an existence of their own. If you delete some of those facts your database is not screwed. You might be screwed, if you needed to know those facts, but your convention that a relation row uniquely identifies a real-world object is your convention, not the database's rule.

(Aside: the relational algebra says we can't have two identical rows: SQL says we can. I say it makes no difference either way because both rows represent the same truth and you have to violate the abstraction using internal row identifiers to differentiate between them)

Back in the room

The reason I've spent this expended all those words explaining the relational model instead of just saying "ActiveRecord has poor support for sticking arbitrary bits of SQL into the code" is to impress on you that it's a beautiful, valuable, and legitimate way to look at the data. And that by imposing the requirement that the resulting relation has to be turned back into an object, we limit ourselves. Consider

We wave #select, #map and #inject around on our in-memory Ruby arrays like a Timelord looking for something to use his sonic screwdriver on. When it comes to doing the same thing for our persistent data: performing set operations on collections instead of iterating over them like some kind of VB programmer, why do we get a sense of shame from "going behind" the object layer and "dropping into" SQL? It's not an efficiency hack, we're using the relational model how it was intended.

And although we can do this in Rails (in fairness, it gets a lot easier now we have Arel and Sequel), I think we need a little bit of infrastructure support (for example, conventions for putting relations into views, or for adding presenters/decorators to them) to legitimise it.

Wrapping up

Summary: (1) our ORM-derived objects expose their internal state, and this is bad. (2) we don't have good conventions for looking at our state except by bundling up small parcels of it and creating objects from them, and this is limiting us because sometimes we want to see a summary composed of parts of several objects. Summary of the summary: (1) exposing state is bad; (2) we can't see all the state in the combinations we'd like.

Yes, I realise the apparent contradiction here, and no, I'm not sure how it resolves. I think there's a distinction to be drawn between the parts of the sytem that allow mutation according to business requirements, and the "reporting" parts that just let us view information in different ways. I also think we're putting behaviour in the wrong places, but that's a topic for Part Three

If you have read all the way to the end, Part Two, "Objective in Rails", will be a run through of my current progress (with code! honest!) for coping with with the first problem and parts of the second. Part Three will be a probably-quite-handwavey look at DCI and how it might provide a way of looking at things which makes both problems go away.