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by dion.
Original Post: My brother editor thinks ORM is like Vietnam
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Ted has spoken out on Objects and Wars.
"Object-relational technologies are the Vietnam of the Computer Science industry." Vendors who go down this road, usually find about the same results emerge as the US did in Vietnam.
Now, the discussion that Ted was in at the time was with Microsoft folks at TechEd. You can hardly blame them for thinking this was as ObjectSpaces has a never-ending release cycle. As soon as Luca (project lead) gets close, Microsoft has a re-org which has him tied to some new schedule. At the moment he is tied in with WinFS and the Longhorn launch. As soon as that gets close they will move him again. Poor guy. He just wants to ship!
I do agree with Ted in that many companies fall into the following trap:
Step 1: Manually writing JDBC code
Step 2: Write some wrapper classes to deal with common things (getting the connection I want, handling the million try/catch/finally, etc
Step 3: Get into primitive OR mapping
Step 4: Realise that what they haven't isn't that useable, and lots of hacks go in to get around problems as they come up
ORM is far from perfect, but we have some great tools now. If you pick up Hibernate, Cayenne, Castor-JDO, iBATIS SQL-MAPS, a JDO implementation, [insert other tools] you will be ahead of the game. A lot of smart people have thought about these problems and although there may be a few hacks a long the way, you are much better off than you were before!
So, cheers to the good OR tools that we have. Hopefully Microsoft will get ObjectSpaces one day ;)
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