What are good or bad design decisions in implementing ActiveRecord?

Question

I am interested in learning more about how ActiveRecord was developed and why specific decisions were made along the path that led to the implementation that we have now.

Can someone give examples of good or bad design decisions that were made in the implementation of ActiveRecord?

Answer 1

The biggest design decision I can think of is with “dynamic” AR models, where it creates fields based on the return of your request, unlike the preferred style of Django and Catalyst “static”, where you list the fields in the code and request them upon request (Catalyst supports dynamic models, but they are not encouraged). "Dynamic" is less verbose, and "static" separates the database structure from the code structure.