JSORM the isomorphic, framework-agnostic Javascript ORM

Why JSORM?

Contracts like JSONAPI and GraphQL treat the API like a database. When querying a database, we have two options:

  • Type the low-level query language directly (in the database world, this would be hand-typing SQL).
  • Use an ORM (like Rails’s ActiveRecord, Phoenix’s Ecto, Django’s DjangoORM, or Node’s Sequelize).

While both options have pros and cons, we tend to think ORMs have two overwhelming benefits: ease of use and composable queries. We’ll explore both these concepts in other sections.

So, we want a javascript ORM for our JSONAPI “database”. Because ActiveRecord is arguably the most well-known ORM, we’ve tried to match its interface to make this library accessible to new users. That said, you’ll find we’ve tried to favor explicitness over implicitness in order to avoid common ActiveRecord pitfalls.