alt Hacker NewsI am a total noob, ok programmer but not a very good developer.
I'm coming to Phoenix with a Django background and I really enjoy what I've been messing around with so far, but I haven't done anything serious with it.
When I hear people say "ash is like an orm" then that fills me with dread. I actually come to enjoy how elixir/Phoenix/ecto has done things
If I'm trying to build something ie a news aggregator site (like hackernews ) - how would "make it in ash" help me? If it does things for me, does that mean I lose control of those things? Or they are hidden behind some macro magic that I have to pull apart to get to?
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FWIW I regret introducing that term into this conversation. I've used it in some cases to try to bring people close to an understanding when we have like...no middle ground. But its nothing close to an ORM.
Ash will be your Django models. Once you have models (ash resources) built; you can use the Ash ecosystem to get things like a graphql or JSON endpoint (or both!) for those resources with just a few lines of code.
"Magic" in software can be good or bad. I've tried to explain the apparent "dark magic" at the end of this article.
https://alembic.com.au/blog/essence-of-ash-framework
Would love any feedback as to whether this helps allay your fear and dread!
Spark is the DSL library that takes a DSL definition as Elixir structs and builds the DSL for you which in turn takes the written DSL and converts to a standard and simple data structure. So there are fewer macros than you might expect. Ash extensions just introspect that generated data structure with ordinary Elixir code.
The main macro in Ash core itself is the `expr` macro which enables portable declarative predicates which can be used in data layers like AshPostgres for filtering in SQL queries. If your data layer is simple like ETS or a CSV then it runs as Elixir code.