Just a quick post having pushed a new project up to GitHub called FluentMySQL, here’s a quick intro:
Overview
This is framework, hoping to solve a very specific problem: building SQL statements which are easy to validate, refactor and help maximise re-use.
Before coming to write this framework, my experience has been with working with in-house database (leaky) abstraction layers, hand-writing SQL builders within frameworks and also the mybatis (previously Apache iBatis). This project has therefore come out of wanting to have the control of writing pure SQL but with the separation and modularity of writing SQL in a framework such as iBatis.
I can foresee that this project could be useful both as a standalone framework to generate SQL to run manually, but also as a feeder into a project to wrap up the execution and mapping of result sets to objects.
Design Principals
Consistency: The feature-set and design should aim to be one-to-one with the MySQL grammar.
Specific: Want to solve a fairly narrow problem, but solve it well. If this works well, then hopefully the same principals could be applied for other such grammars or frameworks.
Immutability: A single query object should not be able to be modified; rather, new copies should be produced on each modification. This makes the approach more akin to that of functional programming (and F# was also a serious consideration for this project).