Philosophy

The Pareto Principle states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In software development terms, this could be translated into something along the lines of 80% of the results come from 20% of the complexity. In other words, you can get pretty far by being pretty stupid.

Idiorm is deliberately simple. Where other ORMs consist of dozens of classes with complex inheritance hierarchies, Idiorm has only one class, ORM, which functions as both a fluent SELECT query API and a simple CRUD model class. If my hunch is correct, this should be quite enough for many real-world applications. Let’s face it: most of us aren’t building Facebook. We’re working on small-to-medium-sized projects, where the emphasis is on simplicity and rapid development rather than infinite flexibility and features.

You might think of Idiorm as a micro-ORM. It could, perhaps, be “the tie to go along with Slim’s tux” (to borrow a turn of phrase from DocumentCloud). Or it could be an effective bit of spring cleaning for one of those horrendous SQL-littered legacy PHP apps you have to support.

Idiorm might also provide a good base upon which to build higher-level, more complex database abstractions. For example, Paris is an implementation of the Active Record pattern built on top of Idiorm.