After some extremely inspiring reading of the LLBLGen Pro documentation
http://www.llblgen.com/pages/documentation.aspx
I'm wondering, can we hope for such a great tool in our very limited OOABL world ?
Or at least, could PSC make a database driver for LLBLGen Pro ?
As someone who has done a lot of work with OR tools, all I can say is "Be careful what you wish for..."
There are tools in the Java space that have been doing the same things for a long time - years longer than MS has. Hibernate is probably the best known of the Java ones. All OR Mapping tools that generate code for you actually create almost as much work as they save because, although they generate the classes you need to be able to do your object-relational mapping, they often require a lot of tuning to achieve the performance that you ultimately need.
Why focus only on O/R? Why not focus on UML model to code, i.e., MDA. Then, you can get it to generate a lot more than just the DA. You can do this at many levels ... just skeletons which you fill in and round trip back into the model at one end or 100% model to code at the other extreme. !00% takes more work, of course, but in the end it saves a lot of work too.
tamhas wrote:
Why focus only on O/R?
Because one has to start somewhere.
tamhas wrote:
Why not focus on UML model to code, i.e., MDA. Then, you can get it to generate a lot more than just the DA. You can do this at many levels ... just skeletons which you fill in and round trip back into the model at one end or 100% model to code at the other extreme. !00% takes more work, of course, but in the end it saves a lot of work too.
Any recommended reading on Model Driven Architecture ?
What is currently available for OOABL + OERDMS ? Or .Net + OERDMS.
I recommend Executable UML: A foundation for Model-Driven Architecture byt Stephen Mellor and Marc Balcer from Addison Wesley. It won't deal with the actual transforms, but is a good introduction to the idea of building models which specifically contain the information needed to generate code. There is some material on the Sparx website about transformations.
I know of two model to code efforts in the OE world iMo and CloudPoint. iMo originally came from EMEA PPS, but has been spun off into a separate company with investors. CloudPoint is from NA PPS and is proprietary to them. I.e., you can't get at either without paying for the consulting. If you can find the funding, let me know and we'll do an open source version.