Hackathon project: Update RDF::Helper

[Kjetil Kjernsmo]

On Monday 12. April 2010 18:41:09 Kip Hampton wrote:

> The general ideas is to have a driver-like system that would implement
> these common conveniences without, insofar as is possible, blocking
> access to whatever whiz-bang features the underlying modules offer.

Yeah, and I think this is still just as valid, but that it perhaps should 
be done in a low-level module, such as RDF::Trine/RDF::Query, which does 
have at least some of the capabilities already. I have to admit that I do 
not have a complete understanding of the overlap here, but it would be 
interesting to get that understanding.
 
> RDF::Helper grew out of my need to switch underlying datastore
> implementations while we found one that would scale to the needs of the
> app. The convenience sugar and RDF::Object bits were a mostly-successful
> attempt to take the complexity and drudgery out of dealing with RDF in
> our applications.

Yeah, and that's a very interesting part.

> I'll admit that, sadly, I haven't really kept up the Trine dev (or much
> of anything else in the Perl+RDF world) for the last couple of years.
> Ultimately, we never found a datastore that would scale to the needs of
> the app and I ended up having to replace the whole data foundation with
> an RDBMS, ORM and SQL queries. As much as I enjoyed doing the Helper,
> RDF was a poor choice and the endless delays resulting from trying to
> paper over the scalability issues ultimately cost us the contract. I
> haven't touched anything RDF-related since.
 
:-(

> That said, hope (and blind
> optimism) springs eternal and I'd be happy to help out where I can.

Great!
 
> Given all of the above, I'm not sure where Teh Helper would even fit in
> the current Perl+RDF ecosystem. I think the general ideas are worth
> saving I'm curious what others think.

I think the critical question is to what extent RDF::Trine/RDF::Query has 
what we need from a bridge layer to RDF::Redland and to other native 
stores. I'm not very interested in RDF::Core anymore, instead we should 
focus on getting Virtuoso and 4store running. If Trine/Query can do all we 
need there, I think that it is well worth taking the sugar and the Object 
stuff, and make it work on the top of Trine, with Moose and quad support. I 
think it would fill a very important need.

The only reason I can see for not doing it, is if Toby's TrineShortcuts 
already does what we need, but I think Toby may have a different focus for 
that module. My main motivation for working with da Helper is to use it as 
a Catalyst model.

Cheers,

Kjetil
-- 
Kjetil Kjernsmo
kjetil at kjernsmo.net
http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/