On CRUD, Scaffolding, ORM and the like.

[eluser]m4rw3r[/eluser]
Note: Bias present in this post

I really like ORM tools, I've made a "light version" of my ORM too - for use when I don't need the "semi-heavy" code for the relations and flexibility.
But I haven't really made a good CRUD interface, which I will probably also do.

IgnitedRecord has really helped me in some projects (database interaction is much easier to handle, because of the record objects and the built in relation handling), and it is extremely helpful for creating small scripts for modifying db tables (using factory and a foreach, it takes about 6-8 lines of code to move data from one (or three) table(s) to another one, while changing it's structure).

I previously (read about a year ago) disliked ORM tools, because of three facts:
- They usually don't have any real flexibility
- Forcing you to structure your data in a certain way
- Performance (I can agree that IR lowers it a bit, but that is the work of AR - mostly)

But when I made IgnitedRecord, I tried to get rid of these disabilities, and I think I've succeeded with the first two (performance is always bad when extra layers of abstraction are used).