A Storm is brewing!
This week, our colleagues in Canonical’s Storm team announced the release of their work as an open source project.
I caught up with Gustavo Niemeyer, who leads the Storm team, and asked him to describe what Storm is about.
Gustavo: Storm is an object-relation mapper (ORM) for the Python language. In simple terms, it allows rows from a relational database to be seen as objects in an object-oriented language like Python.
Matthew: How is Storm different to other similar open source ORMs?
Gustavo: The story behind Storm is that some of the projects developed by Canonical are being built in a way that the same kind of data may be partitioned on multiple databases. We’ve tried to use existing Python ORMs in that model for some time, and even tried to collaborate with upstream projects, but the result wasn’t satisfactory, considering the timeframe available. This led to Storm being started as a prototype, and when it eventually proved to be a feasible solution for the problem, it replaced the ORM in use up to that point.
Matthew: So how can people work on Storm?
Gustavo: The first step is getting in touch with us via the mailing list or the IRC channel. There’s more information about them at the Storm website.
