Andrew's ramblings

Object Relationship Mangers - Why are they so good?

Tags: Coldfusion

When developing applications, most people do not take into consideration that things may change. Or some framework you chose to use ends up not being the framework that you need to do the job with.

ORM's are one of these frameworks that give you an abstraction layer that just can't be beaten.

Currently I have been using Reactor for most of my DAO, DTO and gateway access to do the grunt of the work for my databases. But one of the things that I took for granted was that I would remain with that ORM, so not long ago I downloaded Mark's Transfer and plugged it in and with minimal effort got it running in next to no time.

The beauty is that after learning Design Patterns, I had applied this pattern to the application I designed with the intention that it could be replaced with next to no code changes to the core application.

The only one line of code I had to change, was to a custom method from one of my DAO's that had a very complex sql script that ran way to slow in the normal realm of an ORM.

Apart from that I was able to switch between the two and give a reasonable performance test based on the two frameworks, and Mark I am impressed with Transfer.

The most coolest part, is that when you make a change to the database the change on a code level is almost instant. The only time it is not instant, is when you remove a field from a table and have to remove that reference from the code, which is usually extremely rare.

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