On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 10:28 AM, Jonathan Duncan <[email protected]> wrote: > > As I see, it, the DB agnostic angle is THE angle. I have been using the > CakePHP framework which has an ORM built-in. Learning to use the Cake ORM > instead of straight SQL had a learning curve but since the ORM tackles so > many of the tedious work that I usually had to do manually it was worth the > time, to me. It really depends on what you are using the ORM for, how often > you plan on using it for this project and future projects. If it is a one > time deal, it may not be worth it to you.
It certainly is THE WRONG angle for most applications, except for the cases where you are going to sell your app, and support for multiple databases is a must. There is value in using the advanced features of the database of your choice in your application. Performance, agility, speed of development, full text indexing and searching, geospatial addressing, and many others. If you care about your application, you should care about those things. Trading those off for lowest-denominator, software-generated queries certainly works, but make no mistake: it is a trade-off, and you are paying for it. This is not cross-platform compilation, where you have #ifdef's of code that run on this or that platform. The impact on your application goes much deeper and wider, and should be carefully considered. ORMs provide other attractive features, ease of coding probably being chief amongst them. I believe it to be a mistake to detach yourself from the relational model you are ultimately using, in search of object-oriented nirvana. That too is a trade-off, one with a high price. Roberto Mello _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
