Is RDF "hard"?

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In theory yes, in practice you’ll have to implement it yourself. You’ll find that this is the answer to a lot of questions in Solid. The opportunities are huge in theory, but in practice there is a lot of work to be done.

I think in principle that’s the idea of what my Soukai library does. To use your example with a Customer, you can do this:

class Customer extends SolidModel {

    static fields = {
        firstName: FieldType.String,
        lastName: FieldType.String,
        shippingAddressUrl: FieldType.Key,
        billingAddressUrl: FieldType.Key,
    };

    public shippingAddressRelationship() {
        return this.belongsToOne(Address, 'shippingAddressUrl');
    }

    public billingAddressRelationship() {
        return this.belongsToOne(Address, 'billingAddressUrl');
    }

}

class Address extends SolidModel {

    static fields = {
        streetName: FieldType.String,
        stateOrProvince: FieldType.String,
        postalCode: FieldType.String,
        countryName: FieldType.String,
    };

}

And this is how you use it:

// To create a new customer...
const customer = new Customer({ firstName: 'John', lastName: 'Doe' });

customer.relatedShippingAddress.create({ streetName: 'Foo bar', ... });

await customer.save();

// To retrieve an existing customer
const customer = await Customer.find('https://my-pod.example.com/customers/123');

console.log(`Hello, ${customer.firstName}!`);

The code above works in practice, that’s what I’m doing in my apps (take it as pseudo-code though, I haven’t run this code).

Potentially, my library could be combined with shapes so that you don’t have to define all those classes and fields manually. You could generate them from a local shex file for development, or from a url if you want to generate models at runtime. That’d be similar to what shex-codegen is doing in practice today (I think, I haven’t used this library myself). But I don’t have any plans to do this anytime soon, I haven’t found the need to declare models by hand so hard. If anything, I prefer it because it gives me more flexibility.

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