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Philosophy
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==========
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The `Pareto Principle`_ states that *roughly 80% of the effects come
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from 20% of the causes.* In software development terms, this could be
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translated into something along the lines of *80% of the results come
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from 20% of the complexity*. In other words, you can get pretty far by
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being pretty stupid.
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**Idiorm is deliberately simple**. Where other ORMs consist of dozens of
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classes with complex inheritance hierarchies, Idiorm has only one class,
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``ORM``, which functions as both a fluent ``SELECT`` query API and a
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simple CRUD model class. If my hunch is correct, this should be quite
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enough for many real-world applications. Let’s face it: most of us
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aren’t building Facebook. We’re working on small-to-medium-sized
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projects, where the emphasis is on simplicity and rapid development
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rather than infinite flexibility and features.
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You might think of **Idiorm** as a *micro-ORM*. It could, perhaps, be
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“the tie to go along with `Slim`_\ ’s tux” (to borrow a turn of phrase
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from `DocumentCloud`_). Or it could be an effective bit of spring
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cleaning for one of those horrendous SQL-littered legacy PHP apps you
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have to support.
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**Idiorm** might also provide a good base upon which to build
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higher-level, more complex database abstractions. For example, `Paris`_
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is an implementation of the `Active Record pattern`_ built on top of
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Idiorm.
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.. _Pareto Principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
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.. _Slim: http://github.com/codeguy/slim/
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.. _DocumentCloud: http://github.com/documentcloud/underscore
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.. _Paris: http://github.com/j4mie/paris
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.. _Active Record pattern: http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/activeRecord.html |