/ 
Pixie-2.03
River stage zero No dependents
/ Pixie

NAME

Pixie - The magic data pixie

SYNOPSIS

use Pixie;

my $pixie = Pixie->new->connect('dbi:mysql:dbname=test', $user, $pass);

# Save an object
my $cookie = $pixie->insert($some_object);

undef($some_object);

# Get it back
my $some_object = $pixie->get($cookie);

$pixie->bind_name( "Some Name" => $some_object );
my $result = $pixie->get_object_named( "Some Name" );

DESCRIPTION

Pixie is yet another object persistence tool. The basic goal of Pixie is that it should be possible to throw any object you want at a data pixie and the pixie will just tuck it away in its magic sack, giving you a cookie in exchange. Then, minutes, hours or days later, you can show the pixie your cookie and get the object back.

No schemas. No complex querying. No refusing to handle blessed arrays.

How does pixie do this? Well... when we said 'any object' we were being slightly disingenuous. As far as Pixie is concerned 'any object' means 'any object that satisfies any of these criteria':

  • The toplevel object is a blessed hash.

  • The toplevel object is a blessed array

Right now, Pixie can only save blessed hashes and blessed arrays, but it should be possible to extend it to support 'bless arbitrary scalars'. However, during testing we found that blessed arbitrary scalars were often used with XS classes that stored extra data where Storable and Data::Dumper could not see it, leading to all sorts of horrors on restoration. So we turned that feature off pending a better approach. Further more support for blessed regexes and blessed subroutine references should be possible in the future with very little effort required.

Pixie can additionally be used to name objects in the store, and fetch them later on with that name.

WITH THANKS

Jean Louis Leroy, author of Tangram, for letting us use ideas and code from the Tangram test suite.

AUTHOR

Pixie sprang from the mind of James Duncan <james@fotango.com>. Piers Cawley <pdcawley@bofh.org.uk> and Leon Brocard <acme@astray.org> are his co conspiritors.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2002 Fotango Ltd

This software is released under the same license as Perl itself.