How Pylons connects to the ORM

The Pylons Python web application framework manages database connections for any given application written in the framework. It does so by using a PackageHub class for SQLObject. This is actually similar to how TurboGears manages database connections. The database functionality for the Pylons web framework is defined in the database.py module. This are slightly different for SQLAlchemy support in Pylons. In order to provide SQLAlchemy support, Pylons will attempt to define several functions SQLAlchemy requires to connect to the database.

Something I find a little strange is the way the support for both SQLAlchemy and SQLObject is handled by Pylons. Pylons will attempt to import SQLAlchemy and handle the import error. However, Pylons will always attempt to import SQLObject and will not handle an import failure if the library isn't installed on the system. For instance, the following is a high level view of how the database ORM libraries are imported in Pylons.
There is a slight asymmetry here. At the very least, I think SQLObject errors should be handled as well. But what would happen in the event that there are no supported ORM libraries available for import? That would obviously leave us with a non-functional web application. A nice feature to have, and this really isn't Pylons-specific, is the ability to specify in a configuration sort of way, which ORM library is preferred. The database.py module could then base the imports on this preference. For instance, illustrated below is how the ORM importing mechanism in Pylons might work if the ORM preference could be specified.

Here, the flow is quite simple. We load the configuration data, check which ORM was specified and attempt to import it. On import failure, we complain about an ORN not being available. Of course, we will most likely want a default ORM preference if one is not provided. I think that would provide a much cleaner design than basing the ORM preference on what can be imported. There is certain enhancement functionality in which we can base the availability on the fact that the library can be imported. Such as a plugin for a system. But, these are only enhancements. We can't really make these assumptions about a core component like a database connection manager.

The SQLAlchamy connection functionality in Pylons has no notion of a connection hub. There is absolutely no problem with this. The functions are what is needed to establish a connection to SQLAlchemy and they work. For illustration purposes, lets make a new pretend class that doesn't exist called SQLAlchemyHub that groups all SQLAlchemy-related functions together. The following is what we would end up with when visualizing the database.py module.

It is important to remember that the SQLALchemyHub class isn't real. It is there to help us visualize the SQLAlchemy abstraction within the context of the module.