Frequently Asked Questions

Answers to Questions and/or Strong Assertions :)

  1. Walkable is too high-level? You don’t love SQL?

    TLDR; version: Walkable is both high and low level. We embraces SQL the way Honeysql/Hugsql does.

    People may have this impression because of the use of EQL. Walkable exposes EQL for clients, but also have an adaption layer (that are hidden from clients) where you can use s-expressions (something like honeysql) to build SQL constructs.

  2. But SQL is declarative. If you are not writing SQL directly, you’re doing it wrong!

    The term declarative are inherently relative. If you use Clojure to solve problems that logic programming languages are superior at, your programming task will be tedious. In a similar manner, SQL does not fit well with building APIs which are often nested structures unlike flat tables often seen in SQL.

  3. Why not generate Walkable registry from database schema?

    Walkable offers many things that are simply not part of the database schema. For instance, there is no obvious way to infer authorization constraints from database schema. Also, you don’t always want to expose every single column of every table of the database, right?

    Besides the concern of private data, there’s another aspect: Walkable operates on a high level manner, similar to the way some SQL views abstract away the implementation details of the underlying tables. Can you infer SQL views from a schema? Absolutely no!