MakerSquare Day 26: Little nifty bits of magic (6/3)

You don't often hear "magic" and "database" in the same sentence, except for those sentences that start out, like this one, noting how rarely you hear "magic" and "database" in the same sentence, except for those sentences...

I can never resist a recursion joke.

So "database" and "magic" don't often go together, except for today, when I came back to ActiveRecord and saw how it had all these nifty bits of magic.

Seriously: I can't think of a better word than magic--or nifty--to describe ActiveRecord.

Up till now, a lot of the database work I've done has been directly in postgreSQL, which I weirdly liked. About a week ago, we looked briefly at how ActiveRecord serves as a mediator between SQL-like language and Ruby. It looked interesting and, sure, helpful, but I didn't want to give up the control I had of talking directly to my PSQL database; and anyway, I didn't have any project that needed a database right then.

Fast forward to today, when I was implementing a Rock-Paper-Scissors game and needed a database, and, what's that?, my old notes on ActiveRecord. "Well, why not?" I said to myself.

If you've seen 2001, you'll know what it's like after that, with all the colored lights and the brain-expanding monolith. To be clear: there's something slightly sinister about the Monolith in 2001 and there's something slightly sinister in letting ActiveRecord mediate for you. But still, there are all sorts of--I'll say it again--nifty bits of magic that go into ActiveRecord. Like telling tables so easily what they hold and then, automatically, the entities for those tables know what they should hold too. Or the ease of telling a table to make sure that it has a certain bit of info with "validates." Or--

And so on. You see that none of this is ground-shaking, Level 9 spellcasting. But it's all useful and neat and easy to use. Perfect for a Rock-Paper-Scissors game.

Now I'm off to update my database to show that I've beaten a million people at RPS, because that's one of the simple pleasures of having server access.