Ruby on Rails find API
One big downside to Rails and ActiveRecord is the amount of redundant queries when dealing with associations. "Nextangle":http://www.loudthinking.com/ announced in IRC today that the new Base.find API was checked into "svn":http://dev.rubyonrails.com, so I checked it out.
Using a common weblog schema as an example, you can now do:
Entry.find(:all, :include => :comments)This will grab all the blog entries along with all comments for them in a single query. I've noticed this will return multiple rows of the same blog entry with different comments, but it is better than n+1 queries.
It'd be nice for this to support loading belongs_to associations instead of having to "piggyback the data":http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000235.html. ActiveRecord handles the common cases extremely well, and over time it's handling more complex cases better and better.