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by theptip 27 days ago
No. If you have a simple line-of-business app, writing Django/Rails models is FAR easier than the equivalent SQL.

Even if you think that maintaining your domain model is easier in SQL (it’s not, for most full-stack engineers), the extra capabilities you get from an ActiveRecord framework such as full-stack admin pages, free migrations, etc. win overall.

I can believe that the gap is closing with the “api for your Postgres” frameworks but really, try reaching your frontend developers sql and see if they have a better time than learning Django/Rails.
2 comments
moxza 27 days ago
I wrote my own ORM for exactly this reason. It's far from enterprise grade but it solves for 1) the domain model needs to stay clean and properly normalised and 2) that's not a job that can be distributed across the whole team.

One lesson I've carried for years is that most of the time the client needs denormalised views on the data model. That's the boundary; the server has the clean domain model, and the client works with views on that model. Isn't that exactly what an ORM is for?

I built mine in Dart because I want the server and client to share DTOs. Then I built a visualizer for clientside devs to be able to explore entity relationships (DDD style) and generate a JSON contract. The end result is no REST back and forth, no GraphQL complexity, just everyone in the team focusing on what they're good at.

I think the theme that ORMs are easy to start, but you pay for it with the edge cases, so good devs end up back at SQL does not apply when you're thinking about how to build a platform. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. Aligning the team on playing to their strengths was my goal when I reached for yet another ORM as the solution.

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thwarted 27 days ago
> extra capabilities you get from an ActiveRecord framework such as full-stack admin pages

The naive "here's a row-level view of the database records" that things like ActiveRecord/ActiveAdmin give you by default are entirely inappropriate for any line of business administrative interaction. Line of business admin sites should be workflow based and focused on surfacing specific information needed for processes outside of the admin site itself. Non-developer staff should not be expected to interpret the state of rows and relationships among the tables.

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