The Fan distribution contains a pod called haven which was originally designed to be an ORM engine for Fan to test out the sql and Namespace APIs. The original version of Sidewalk (this discussion forum) was written using haven. The developer working on haven quit after a few months, so it's a dead project now. The new version of Sidewalk Andy released this week doesn't use haven anymore (it uses the sql APIs directly). So I will be removing haven from the distribution.

This is interesting. Sidewalk is not public yet if I am not mistaken. What was the rationale to move from Haven to sys::Sql? Did you find the API unsuitable/badly designed or did you move just because Maven was abandoned and it was too much work to keep it going and enhance?

We have not published Sidewalk yet - mostly just because it isn't really documented or easily supported. But I'm sure we will release as open source eventually.

We switched off of Haven mostly because the original developer didn't have time to work on it and neither Andy nor I wanted to spent the time to maintain and finish it - doing ORM right is a pretty huge project. I'm not a huge believer in ORM to begin with, so the right solution for us is use RDBMS directly via the sql APIs. There is a middle ground in dealing with the idiosyncrasies of various databases, which we do try to capture in sql::Dialect.

Reviving a dead and buried thread here - is the haven source still available? I've tried to dig through mercurial but can't see it (chances are I'm digging wrong).

That was before the switch to Mecurial.

But it is in the old build 1.0.31

Ahh - I didn't realize that all of the downloads could still be found at http://code.google.com/p/fan/downloads/list - thanks!

And if you want to go really far back all the builds back to 1.0.1 are available on SourceForge