Let me preface all of this by stating that I'm playing devil's advocate and
this in no way implies that any firm decisions have been made on this issue
(at least not to my knowledge). All opinions expressed here are my own and
do not in any way reflect any official position of the OpenBD project on
this issue. (I know, probably being overly anal, but I'm seen way too many
discussions get truncated and taken out of context if one isn't careful, so
I don't want this to turn into someone twittering "omg OpenBD isn't going to
be compatible with CF 9 orm!!!11")

With the legalities out of the way ... ;-)

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 11:24 AM, Brian FitzGerald
<[email protected]>wrote:

> To me this is by far the bet
> feature in CF9 and is something I would really love to see implemented
> in OpenBD.
>

In theory it's a great feature, but of course it's not without some issues
in its implementation. If you read the blogs, etc. there's quite a mixed bag
of opinions on this.


>
> It appeared in the old thread that you guys are considering
> replicating much of the functionality w/o using Hibernate under the
> hood?  I'm not an orm expert, but it seems to me like this would make
> it harder to maintain compatibility moving forward


Well, depends on how deep you go with "compatibility." As far as the voting
stands so far anyway, the CFML Advisory Committee is calling ORM a "vendor
specific" feature, meaning the people involved with the CFML language
standardization effort (of which I'm one) don't see ORM as a core enough
feature at this stage to recommend full compatibility between engines.

Syntax-wise, I suspect all the engines will tend to lean towards
compatibility with CF 9 (which is not great IMO, but more on that later). In
terms of under the hood features and behavior, to me that's up for debate.
I'm not saying any decisions have been made one way or another, but just as
an example, if a solution that's syntactically the same can offer 90% of the
features but perform better and be simpler to implement, that has to be
weighed against full compatibility and the extra effort, performance
degradation, etc. that might come along with that for the extra 10% of the
features. Or what about a solution that syntactically is much less verbose
but still gets the job done?

Again, just so it's clear, this is all hypothetical at this point. Just
offering my opinion on things.


> and could also
> limit some of the powerful features that CF9's orm offers.


As always we're going to be driven by what our users most want and need, and
we absolutely value everyone's feedback on this issue.


> Is it
> still up for discussion to have CF9 orm implemented in OpenBD with
> Hibernate behind the scenes?


Certainly--I for one would love to hear what people think on this issue, and
as we move along towards implementation we'll be wanting to gather even more
feedback.


> Again, I for one would love to see it,
> and would consider it a huge incentive to use OpenBD more in the
> future.
>

Are you saying that implementing Hibernate *specifically* would be a huge
incentive, or if you had a great ORM solution at all, that's a huge
incentive?

This is a big topic of course. Speaking personally, I find the syntax of the
Hibernate wrapper in CF 9 to be unnecessarily verbose, and the behavior in
some cases is rather "wonky" (to use a technical term). So again speaking
personally, I'd love to see a more streamlined syntax for an ORM solution as
opposed to compatibility for compatibility's sake.

That being said, syntax compatibility is probably in everyone's best
interest (unfortunately; maybe we can offer a split solution and let people
choose). 100% functional and behavioral compatibility, to me that's up for
debate because if the pros of implementing things differently outweigh the
cons, I'd like to see that at least debated so we can get everyone's
feedback.

-- 
Matthew Woodward
[email protected]
http://mpwoodward.posterous.com
identi.ca/Twitter: @mpwoodward

Please do not send me proprietary file formats such as Word, PowerPoint,
etc. as attachments.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

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