Philosophy of PikaORM
PikaORM was brought to you by Carson Gross with affiliation from Big Sky Software, The Open Source Group @ MSU, and The Hypermedia Research Group with student assistance from Will Mitchell. Created in summer 2025, Carson had a vision to kill two birds with one stone, creating a sleek and small ORM to display for his 440 Database Systems class for Montana State University as well as open source the software for anyone to use. Pika is additionally a new pillar of HyperMedia, used as the ORM of choice in the Notch Language projects, and future HyperMedia Web development with Java.
Design Approach
The philosophy around Pika has always been simple. To design an API that people can actually use, understand, change and modify to there liking. In particular the API design of the system follows a concept of Layered API Design discussed by Carson at the 2025 Big Sky Dev Con. The idea being to create stepping stones of complexity for API’s, allowing a new user to worry little about customization or system knowledge, being able to use the API out of the box, while building additional onion layers of complexity as the user starts to understand the API. PikaORM offers an incredibly intuitive basic design for people to interact with their data, using essentially all methods to invoking the querying actions. Beyond that however, users can then change their own mappings, metadata, and logging settings all on their own, simply implemented with just a few more methods. All of this general principle comes from Carson’s ultimate coding philosophy of complexity bad which has his full thoughts on coding paradigms.
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Documentation written by Will Mitchell and Carson Gross
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