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vendor/j4mie/idiorm/docs/philosophy.rst

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+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.
+
+.. _Pareto Principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
+.. _Slim: http://github.com/codeguy/slim/
+.. _DocumentCloud: http://github.com/documentcloud/underscore
+.. _Paris: http://github.com/j4mie/paris
+.. _Active Record pattern: http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/activeRecord.html