posted 13 years ago
I'm coming late to this discussion, but this has been on my mind lately as well...
I don't feel completely comfortable with Models in ActiveRecord either, for the same reasons mentioned by a few other posters above. A lot of this boils down to personal preferences and style - for me, the Model object is the foundation of how I think about code. I often think about a problem in terms of objects (which I'll admit isn't always the best approach), and when I start writing code, I often begin with the object model. ActiveRecord clearly takes a different approach that has proven to be immensely productive. However, I'd rather be able to define my objects more explicitly.
Do keep in mind that this is really about ActiveRecord, not rails per se. There's nothing really stopping you from writing your own object model and persistence tier in Rails if you want to do things differently. Another thing you might want to do is look into DataMapper, which is an alternative to ActiveRecord that would probably appeal to people who want more direct control over the model (check out datamapper.org).
That said, I haven't really used datamapper, mainly because in spite of what I wrote above, I'm willing to stick with ActiveRecord. I think I gain much more than I give up, and if I'm using Rails, it's probably because the rails conventions line up very nicely with my project. Keep in mind that a lot of extremely useful plugins also assume ActiveRecord. One of the things I like most about Rails is how easily everything seems to work with minimal configuration - in other words, I'm often willing to make a trade off to take advantage of Rails conventions, including ActiveRecord.
But yeah, for those of us who tend to think in objects (POJOs, for instance), it can be disconcerting to open up a model and see nothing there.
Of course, this is my first day really digging into Rails in over 2 years. And at that time, I didn't even get this far. Just something else to get used to I suppose.
