ActiveHibernate: time to package

Good news. Hibernate collection mapping is up and running. Well, one example that is: Hibernate's bag type now works with Ruby Array's, lazy loading included. To get started I've done a shameless copy/paste of the Hibernate code for the bag collection type. That went fairly easy because the Java class RubyArray implements the java.util.List interface. So now the mapping files look like

<hibernate-mapping>

    <class table="BLOGS" lazy="false" entity-name="Blog">

        <tuplizer entity-mode="dynamic-map"
            class="activehibernate.RubyTuplizer"/>

        <id name="id" column="BLOG_ID" type="long">
            <generator class="identity"/>
        </id>

        <property name="title" type="string" />

        <bag name="items"
             collection-type="activehibernate.RubyArrayType">
            <key column="blog_id" />
            <one-to-many entity-name="Item"/>
        </bag>

    </class>

</hibernate-mapping>

where Blog and Item are genuine Ruby classes. The nice part is that I haven't touched any existing Hibernate or JRuby code.

The plan is to package the things I already have (still need to write more tests to show what is working) and put it on SourceForge or Google Code to get some feedback from JRuby and/or Hibernate people. (I can very well imagine I've made things to complex where simpler solutions exist out-of-the-box.) After that it's time to start looking at ways to get rid of the XML mapping files by writing a friendly Ruby interface around the Hibernate details.

I hope that after some time this project will be stable/useful enough to be part of JRuby Extras at RubyForge.