Status of Riak support in Padrino

Back story

(skip to the bottom if you want the nitty gritty status)

So I got this wild hair up my butt a week or so ago. I wanted to get into the Padrino internals and actually contribute to an open source project. I've been using open source software for years. I've made a good living from it. I owe a lot to it.

My problem has always been the fact that I'm not a programmer by education nor by trade. I've always been a systems/architecture guy. Of course, a systems guy is a programmer at some level thanks to shell scripting, administrative scripts and the like. The DevOps philosophy makes that even more tangible by treating your systems in the same way a developer would treat his code. The most I've ever done previously in terms of contribution has been a bug fix here and there or documentation. All very valuable but in some capacity, not as rewarding.

So I've started mucking about with Sinatra. I used it to build some web service gateways for our production environment. That led me to Padrino. I noticed that Padrino didn't have ORM support for a few of the other schemaless/NoSQL databases so I figured it was a good way to contribute. I picked Riak out of the blue because the first episode of the ChangeLog Show I listened to had the Riak guys on there. Little did I know ;)

Riak/Ripple Status

Once I got a handle on the Ruby driver that Sean Cribbs is writing for Riak, I dove right in and forked the Padrino code base. Github makes it EXCEEDINGLY easy to be a contributer and I really think they've ushered in a new wave of open source development.

The Riak ruby driver comes in two flavors - riak-client and ripple. Riak-client is a more "basic" wrapper around riak operations - CRUD, link-walking, map/reduce. Ripple is the "next-gen" (imho) driver that borrows design from ActiveRecord, MongoMapper and DataMapper.

After poking a bit with riak-client, I decided that the ripple driver was much more "in-line" with the other ORMs supported in Padrino. I started to go whole hog before I realized that ripple had some missing functionality I was expecting. This was not anyone's fault but my own. Essentially this prevented me from using the ripple ORM in Padrino's admin interface. Not a big deal but it would have been nice to have.

Sean Cribbs was VERY responsive over twitter and let me know that the features I was looking for would be added. He opened an issue and last night, support for update_attribute/update_attributes was added. I grabbed the latest build and went to town on my local padrino-framework fork.

This is where I ran into another issue. Essentially, the other NoSQL ORMs that padrino supports use some tricks for handling unique keys. I know this is trying to shoehorn RDBMS ideas on top of schema-less databases.

So how do the other ORMs handle it?

• mongomapper/mongoid - supports 'validates_uniqueness_of' on model definitions
• couchrest - supports unique records via a map/reduce job

Nothing similar exists in the ripple driver "yet". I say yet because I fired off an email to Sean and got a very well-thought out response.

As a side note, Basho, you hired a good man to bear the title of "Developer Advocate".

Essentially Sean brought up a good point. Since you don't have "transactions or global consistency", there's no good way to guarantee that a key is unique.

I've essentially got two options if I want to continue down the path of support Padrino's admin with Riak - do the map/reduce route or do a check myself before calling save. I'm still deciding the best route to take.

Alternatively, I could simply not worry about it and forgo admin support in the ORM. It's not a deal breaker and it's not a requirement per the Padrino folks. It just would have been nice.

So what's the status?

Right now, using ActiveModel/ActiveSupport 3.0.0.beta4, Ripple from ripple/master and my fork of padrino-framework, I can create models and things work as expected.

The biggest headache for me is having to edit the Gemfile and append the versions for ripple and activesupport. I'm also working on adding gem version support to require_dependencies.

So you wanna try it yourself? Go right ahead. You'll need to grab my fork of the framework (I keep it up to date with master) and seancribbs/ripple. There are rake tasks to build and install those locally. I would HIGHLY suggest you create an RVM gemset. Additionally you'll need to grab ActiveSupport 3.0.0.beta4.

After that:

• padrino-gen project test -d ripple
• cd test
• edit Gemfile and append version 0.7.1 to the ripple line.
• bundle install
• padrino-gen model person name:string email:string phone:string

You should now have a working model using riak via ripple. Here's a Gist of me doing exactly that via padrino-console:

Anyway, I'm intent on getting ripple support back into upstream but I'm not going to make a pull request until ActiveSupport reaches 3.0. It feels half baked to have these extra steps to get it working and I'd really like to have admin support done before I do if possible.