Just saying Hi

[mhayhurst]

Have been looking at SchemaCoder for a short while and finally took the plunge and bought it after paining over ORMs for weeks. I had been looking at OpenAccess, EntitySpaces, LightSpeed, EntityFramework, SubSonic and NHibernate - most had /something/ going for them but the key problems seemed to be:

difficulties in getting up to speed due to poor documentation and/or support (peer or otherwise)
much better support for forward mapping from a class model rather than reverse mapping from a database (I am rebuilding a reasonably large classic ASP site in ASP.NET and the schema is only slightly changed)
a development roadmap that is non-existent, moribund or chaotic
the need in many of them to still write your own BLL and BO tiers by hand

I chose Schemacoder in the end because it did at least as much of what I needed as any other but mainly because it just seems transparent and straightforward. By transparent I don't mean the 'doing stuff by magic' that other ORMs try - when you look for the method to List record for example you cannot find it because it is runtime-generated. Cost was not a major issue (the time and energy taken to learn any tool and trust it to work for many years is a far greater concern) - with better marketing and example code I suspect the product could command a higher price but the ORM market and its products are very immature as yet.

I'm pretty happy that I can crack on with my site conversion based on Schemacoder but it would be good to hear what's on the roadmap for upcoming releases.

Cheers,
Mark2

[Michael A. McCloskey]

It's great to get feedback like this. It has always been a consideration to keep the generated code "transparent" as you put it. Retaining the ability to get under the hood if necessary (which is hopefully an infrequent occurrence) is important.

As far as the SchemaCoder road map goes, the next significant addition will probably be the addition of collection attributes/properties so that one can define object hierarchies and create code like this, which is currently doable if you create your own partial classes.

Order o = customer.Orders[...].OrderDetails[...]

Beyond that, it's hard to say. Getting better document and examples is also a priority. Support for additional database has been requested (Access 2007 and VistaDB). Everything is customer driven so whatever is most in demand is what will be added. There are some requests that might have to be deferred to a 2.0 rewrite. Support for plugins falls into this category. There is probably a lot that can still be done with the 1.x codebase though, so it will continue to be enhanced until it no longer makes sense to do so.

Thanks again for your feedback and support.