More 'About Storm'

[AlphaCentauriSoftware]

Hi everyone:

I just joined the storm mailing list and saw the email below from Stuart Bishop.

When I first saw storm being mentioned and checked out the tutorial I got really excited.

however, it didn't last very long. (yes, yes, i know storm is just an infant and things need to be put in place)

I have been programming database applications for almost 20+ years and wanting to get away from delphi, visual foxpro and microsoft access; so i started looking for more info on storm--even googled it to disappointment. and that's why i joined this list.

The first question that came to my mind is how is storm going to help me? Although the tutorial on the storm page showed me examples (which got me excited seeing its simplicity), I couldn't find answers about how can i code these features into an app. I only understood it to be a data store, but how do I implement it? how do i wire it up with an interface for end-users?

to add to stuart's questions:

My questions would be like:

-- what widget system would i use to work with this store? wxWidgets, Qt? examples please...
-- how would i populate these widgets with data from the data store?
-- how would i make the widgets data aware?
-- how would i commit the data updates in the widgets?
-- how is the store used to refresh pagination in a datagrid?
-- can the store cache be used offline and then subsequently be used to update the backend db?
-- is the data store synchronized with the db? if not how do we check before committing updates?
-- how are database error messages handled by the store so we can inform users in the client application? or decide upon a course of action.
-- how do we work with stored procedures at the back-end db?
-- etc...
-- python is cross-platform, but what is the store's compatibility with win32, gtk, kde? what are the nuances? (surely, i'm gonna get shot here by someone on the list as a stupid question)

whatever stuart says below is great, it throws a lot more light on storm.

my questions however start from the view of a person actually coding a database app and how to wire it all up?

i'm still excited about storm and hope this is what database app programmers are looking for. thanks for the great job done.

best regards
ram sambamurthy
kuala lumpur, malaysia

PS: i'm subscribed to the digest so it becomes a little difficult to reply. pardon me if i'm not following any protocol such as replies come at the end and not at the beginning. does this list practice anything like that?

-------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 07:31:35 +0700
From: Stuart Bishop <stuart.bishop at canonical.com>
Subject: More 'About Storm'
To: storm at lists.canonical.com
Message-ID: <46957667.1070300 at canonical.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

I think there is more information needed in the About Storm section on the
storm.canonical.com front page. Something like:

Storm is different to other Python ORMs:

 * Designed from day one to be database administrator friendly.
 * Designed from day one to work both at the low end, with trivial small
databases, and the high end, with applications accessing billion row tables
and committing to multiple database backends.
 * Designed from day one to work both with thin relational databases, such
as SQLite, and big iron systems like PostgreSQL, DB2 & Oracle.
 * Distributed database integrity using two-phase commit (if your Python
driver and database backend support it).
 * Storm does not dictate your datamodel.
 * Storm lets you efficiently access and update large datasets by allowing
you to formulate complex queries spanning multiple tables using Python.
 * Storm lets you fallback to SQL if needed (or if you just prefer),
allowing you to mix 'old school' code and ORM code

These are all from my perspective, so may not be general enough for the
front page. Other people might have points or catch phrases to add too, but
we don't want the section to grow too big so high level points should
replace low level points.