Converting CDBI to DBIC (part 2): The supposed similarities

(You can catch Part 1 for the context)

The first thing you notice when comparing CDBI and DBIC is that the APIs look really really similar. They both have the same method names for almost everything most people use them for. So, you'd think that it's as easy as swapping out use statements, adding a few lines to the table definitions, and calling it a day.

And, unless your application is so exceedingly simple that you were able to keep to the officially published CDBI API, not a single test will pass. (You do have tests, right?) Every problem arises out of the need to have abused CDBI in order to get work done.

Class::DBI is built upon Ima::DBI, a connection caching and SQL management distribution. Every method provided by CDBI is built using Ima::DBI's set_sql() and transform_sql() methods. These methods, while pretty neat, are very hard to extend because they use string transformation.

DBIx::Class, on the other hand, is built on three major concepts that CDBI doesn't have:

• everything is componentized using C3 method resolution
  
• SQL::Abstract to generate the SQL
• first-class distinction between ResultSets and Rows

These three differences mean that what should, in theory, be a simple conversion between two modules that expose similar APIs becomes a much more difficult thing to do. Over the next few posts, I'll examine why each of these differences is important and how each one complicates the conversion process.