A thought occurred to me today- just because something doesn't offer all you need, doesn't mean you can't put it to good reuse. This goes back to Sean Corfield's post
about why you should avoid the not-invented-here syndrome, my own post about
why I thought I would release cfrails (and some of the decisions therein), and a multitude of others who realize that reinventing the wheel is not generally productive.
I had the realization today (though, I must admit it is quite obvious!) that there would be nothing wrong with adding an extra layer of abstraction, which would in turn add the features you needed to some other product/library/code. So when I thought "well, I can't use
Transfer or
Reactor" (what ever happened to Arf!?) because they didn't provide all the metadata I needed, I could have still built on top of them. I guess the thought never occurred to me back then.
In any case, it has now. Although I'm far enough along that I don't think doing this will save me any more time, it's something I plan on investigating- at the very least, it could provide a familiar API to use (and of course, the framework would be generating any XML files rather than having the programmer modify them).
So basically, if you think you don't want to use a pre-made product - at least you should look into the possibility of building on top of it.
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I've been playing with this a lot too. For instance, Steve Bryants DataMgr is a good candidate for building an ORM as it takes care of lots of the SQ abstraction so you can focus on providing the OO piece.
That said, it is a balance between the costs and benefits. The biggest issue in CF is that none of the OSS projects are very mature - there is nothing like Hibernate where you look at it and say "that would take me years", although of course, the more we all work together on a smaller set of projects, the closer we'll come.
Will be interesting to see how things develop!
Posted by
Peter Bell
on Mar 31, 2007 at 09:01 AM UTC - 5 hrs
"none of the OSS projects are very mature - there is nothing like Hibernate where you look at it and say "that would take me years""
I think that is generally true of just about anything you'll build in CF versus Java =)
Posted by
Sam
on Mar 31, 2007 at 10:18 AM UTC - 5 hrs
