What kinds of queries are sprinkled throughout that are not part of AR, or depend on AR?
Sure, if you are going to swap out AR for another ORM in the middle of an established project you are going to have a bad time, but if one is doing that I have larger questions.
I wasn't saying that we want to swap it out in the middle of an established project, but that it's impossible to do so in a greenfield project too.
there's MongoID and it's OK-ish, -a brilliant piece of work though!- but not particularly good inside Rails yet the best alternative example there is. Yet with this (naturally) many gems won't work either. Everything in the community simply presumes Rails' AR is always there. Because it practically always is.
ROM-rb, and Sequal all attempted to be "plugin replacements" but the author of the first rage-quitted at some point exacly because Rails (the dev team) refused some compromises or even abstractions that would allow swapping AR out for something that fits SomeProject better, at the start.
I must be misunderstanding the question because anything that queries in rails uses AR and that's often done in both lib code and controller code rather than behind a dedicated module boundary.
> because anything that queries in rails uses AR and that's often done in both lib code and controller code
How is that different from any other framework ever? You have to query the DB somewhere. Rails makes it incredibly easy to swap out databases. Much more so than any other platform I can think of.
Nothing is making you use AR at all. This is a non issue.
Sure, if you are going to swap out AR for another ORM in the middle of an established project you are going to have a bad time, but if one is doing that I have larger questions.