On 11/23/05, Simon Willison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In defence of live introspection, Matt Biddulph made the excellent > point at the web frameworks night earlier this week that the Rails > method is extremely useful early on in your design process when you > are rapidly iterating your DB design - i.e. making things up as you > go along :) He's right too - the hoops you have to jump through > changing schema with Django do slow you down if you haven't figured > out your full data model in advance.
I'm not so sure about that; reading through the Rails book, when changes are made to data models they rarely use 'ALTER'; the examples often blow away an entire existing table, data and all, and then re-create it with the new structure. Which seems at least as cumbersome, if not more so (since in Rails you're writing SQL directly) than Django (since in addition to this scaffolding often also must be re-generated). Maybe there's a more efficient way to do this, but I'm a good ways into the book and I'd think if there were an easier way they'd have introduced it by now... And while I understand the advocacy of "agile development" and many rapid iterations, I do think the data model should still be planned in advance as much as possible, precisely to avoid these sorts of problems. So anything which encourages you to do so is a good thing in my book. -- "May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house." -- George Carlin
