Having discussed different aspects of simplicity in programming solutions, let’s start with the first topic that should be scrutinized regarding their simplicity: persisting model objects. As you may know, we have competing solutions which fall into two categories: they will follow either the Active Record (AR) or the Data Mapper pattern (DM) (as described in Martin Fowler’s “Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture”, abbrev. PoEAA).

Active record

How do we recognize the AR pattern? It’s when you instantiate a model object and then call save() on it:

“As I’m becoming a more experienced programmer, I tend to prefer simple solutions.” Or something similar. As is the case with many programming-related quotes, this is somewhat of a blanket statement because who doesn’t prefer simple solutions? To make it a powerful statement again, you’d have to explain what a simple solution is, and how you distinguish it from not-so-simple solutions. So the million-dollar question is “What is a simple solution?”, and I’ll answer it now.