[Laszlo-dev] For your review: Laszlo Database API spec version 1.1

[Max Carlson]

Hi Henry,

Thanks for your feedback.  I'll definitely put some more background on 
how the spec will ultimately work in the context of Laszlo.  Replies below:

Henry Minsky wrote:
> I'm a little unclear on how things are divided up to build an app. When 
> you declare a model, that gets compiled on the *server* into a a 
> database schema and a handler that accepts incoming URLs which contain 
> those path-like commands, right?

Correct.

> On the client, there is some protocol that can deserialize the results 
> of commands and turn them into .. .what? datasets?

A dataset.  As the records in the dataset are mutated, change commands 
would accumulate on the client.  They would then be sent up to the 
server to alter the data source.

> One thing I am concerned about is what is the mechanism where the user  
> can override or extend  the SQL that is automatically compiled, and 
> directly right their own "command handlers" (I'm not sure what to call 
> this) on the server?

I'll add a post-processing callback that allows developers to alter the 
generated SQL as they see fit.

I'll also add a more generic kind of method call that specifies a method 
signature that gets invoked on the server.

> In my experience, each particular brand of database you choose for the 
> back end will have many of its own quirks or unique non standard 
> features, which you will often want to take advantage of, so it would be 
> important to be able to manually write your own "methods", and 
> particulary in the case where you do complex transactions than involve 
> touching a lot of tables, or that involve calling stored procedures in 
> some complex way...

The idea is to hide or abstract as much of that complexity as possible, 
but I agree, we need the escape hatch.

Thanks again!

-Max