A Scala API for Datomic
Datomisca is a thin layer around Datomic aimed at exposing Datomic’s functionality and leveraging its full power.
The key Datomic features we really love are:
In our design, we are also deeply aware of the architecture of Datomic:
Datomisca uses Scala features to enhance the Datomic experience for Scala developers:
Other than the small handful of Datomic specific types, Datomic’s Java API specifies parameter and return types almost all as Object
s, List
s, and Map
s.
For example, the result of a query has type List[List[Object]]
, signifying a set of heterogenously-typed tuples.
In Datomisca, we provide the means to recover the dynamic types of these objects into static Scala types.
An important feature of Datomic is that entities have no specific representation beyond a set of datoms with a common identity. The consequence is that it is really easy to manipulate data in an atomic way.
In designing Datomisca, we wanted to preseve this property. That’s why we don’t focus on mapping entities to and from Scala case classes. Nonetheless, we provide the means to construct mappings as an extension. We caution the keen case-class-mapper to see case classes as a logical view on a collection of datoms, rather than datoms corresponding to an object model.