Philosophy of PikaORM
PikaORM was brought to you by Carson Gross with affiliation from Big Sky Software and HyperMedia Systems, with student assistance from Will Mitchell. Created in summer 2025, Carson had a vision to create a sleek and small ORM for his 440 Database Systems class at Montana State University — and open source it for anyone to use.
Pika is additionally a pillar of HyperMedia, used as the ORM of choice in the JackKnife Aggregator projects and future HyperMedia web development with Java.
Complexity bad. Simplicity, always.— Carson Gross, Big Sky Dev Con 2025
Layered API Design
The philosophy around Pika has always been simple. To design an API that people can actually use, understand, change and modify to their liking. In particular the API design follows a concept of Layered API Design discussed by Carson at the 2025 Big Sky Dev Con.
The idea is to create stepping stones of complexity for APIs — 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 layers of complexity as people start to understand the API or want to change it in some way.
PikaORM offers an incredibly intuitive basic design for people to interact with their data — using essentially all methods to invoke querying actions. Beyond that, users can change their own mappings, metadata, and logging settings simply, with just a few more methods.
If you like our work and would like to support HyperMedia and future web-technologies, consider sponsoring us or reaching out to help.
Documentation written by Will Mitchell :)