What is Mince

Mince is a ruby gem to provide a light weight ORM to persist data to a variety of databases in ruby apps.

The motivation behind this is so your application is not tightly tied to a specific database. As your application grows you may need to upgrade to a different database or pull specific models to a different persistence strategy.

Other ORMs are married to the Active Record Architecture Pattern. Although Mince can be used with the Active Record pattern as well, it is designed to be used in more of a Multitier Architecture Pattern, where the data layer is separated from the business logic layer in the application.

View the Why Multitier Architecture? page for more discussion

Language Dependency

Currently only compatible with Ruby 1.9+. Support for Ruby 1.8 to come later.

How to use it

This library contains the core components to use Mince supported database interfaces. These interfaces can be interchanged, but in this setup example we will be using HashyDb, which is an in-memory ruby hash database.

Install

Install mince and hashy_db gems:

gem install mince hashy_db

Config

Use the config class to configure which mince database interface you desire to use:

require 'mince'
require 'hashy_db'

Mince::Config.interface = Mince::HashyDb::Interface

Use it

# Get the interface
interface = Mince::Config.interface

# Add a book
interface.add 'books', title: 'The World In Photographs', publisher: 'National Geographic'

# Get all books
interface.find_all 'books'

# Replace a book where the record's id is 1
# Use the interface's primary_key field because
# some databases use non `id` fields for the primary key
primary_key = interface.primary_key
interface.replace 'books', primary_key => 1, title: 'A World In Photographs', publisher: 'National Geographic'

Deeper Look

The following pages provide a deeper look into Mince

Link	Description
API Docs	API docs for Mince
Existing Interfaces	List of supported database interfaces that can be used with Mince
Mince Migrator	Database migrations library for Mince
Usage with Rails	More information on how to use Mince with Rails
Fancy Mixins	We've written a few mixins that provide some standard behavior to your models while using Mince
Development	Help by contributing
Mailing List	Mailing list for Mince
Travis CI	Check out the build status of Mince
Why Multitier Architecture?	Discussion about why to use multi tier architecture as apposed to others, such as Active Record

Contribute

You can contribute to Mince by doing a number of things. View the Development page for more details.

Contributors

Name	Twitter	Github
Matt Simpson (owner & maintainer)	@railsgrammer	@coffeencoke
Jason Mayer	@farkerhaiku	@farkerhaiku
Amos King	@adkron	@adkron
Ionic Mobile Team	@asynchrony	@ionicmobile
David Czarnecki	@czarneckid	@czarneckid
Kenny Ortmann	@yairgo	@yairgo
Helena Converse	@n3rdgir1	@n3rdgir1

If you've been missed on this list, let us know by creating an issue or sending one of us a message.

License

MIT - view LICENSE.txt in the source for details

Version 1

Looking for support for Version 1? Put an issue in, or send one of us a message.

mince

Development

Runtime