Mel said:
Is anyone out there using a C#.NET OR mapping framework in a production
environment? I'm thinking of such frameworks as nHibernate, Gentle, etc..
I've looked at quite a few but none of them seem mature enough for serious
use. Looking for suggestions. Thanks.
Many a flame war this subject has started. But for the sake of
repeating history, here's my take:
There's the ObjectSpaces factor to be considered. Someday, hopefully
before our sun goes supernova, ObjectSpaces will be released, and while
it certainly won't be the best nor the prettiest ORM tool in the shed,
it will become the de facto standard that other ORM tools are compared
against.
Based on that, one could classify current day ORM tools into two
categories: those that try to mimic the functionality of ObjectSpaces
(based on a very early beta that was released eons ago), and those ORM
tools that are doing their own thing.
Tools in the former category are living on borrowed time, so you want
to find one that you believe to be the most ObjectSpaces-friendly,
since you'll end up migrating to ObjectSpaces anyway. In this category
I have very little advice to offer. EntityBroker might be an excellent
choice; I can't say because I haven't tried it.
Tools in the lattar category are as of yet in limited supply in the
..NET world. There are some brave souls out there that are trying to
port Java framework to .NET, but alas most are still betas.
There's one framework that I find very interesting and practical, and
its Java counterpart has been in use for years, and that is iBATIS.NET
(
http://incubator.apache.org/ibatis/site/index.html). Both Java and
..NET versions are in the process of moving to Apache.org, so that
speaks volumes to their credit.
iBATIS falls in the lattar category, as it does its own very unique
thing. Instead of mapping objects to tables and toutinh "Never Again,
SQL!" line, it allows you to map objects to SQL statements. I find that
very agreeable with my taste, since it's not writing the SQL statements
part that I loathe, it's manually packing and unpacking result sets in
and out of objects.
Again, this is just my take, so take it with a pitcher of salt.
