getting our of 'nam for som R&R

A few weeks ago I read an article on TSS called Ted Neward explains ORM as "The Viet Nam of Computer Science.

I have to say, from personal experience, that I agree with him.I got interested in O/R several years ago, and wound up writing an implementaiton of JSR 12, Java Data Object called JDOMax www.jdomax.com. It took about 2.5 years to write the software and pass the Sun Test Compatibility Kit. While I was writing the software, I often got the feeling I was going down into the rabbit hole. And after some time, just passing the TCK became a goal in and of itself. When all was said and done, roughly 50,000 lines of code had been written and debugged, and was being used by a few hundred downloaders. Then I got married and haven't looked back at my hobby since.

My goal now is to produce some software that can be used to easily query , insert, and delete data from the relational database, with a small learning curve, and most of all a small internal codebase. Basically, I have to distill something that is vastly simpler than the fullblown JDO that I had implemented, if I am to have any hope of getting out of 'Nam for some R&R.

Over the last few years, there has been a lot of debate on "query by example" vs. "query language". Having written a JDOQL compiler using JavaCC, I knew that I was going to have dispatch with the query language. Too much complexity, and more code than I can maintain. The second thing I decided to do away with was transparent object persistence. Transitive closure persistence, simply isn't an essential feature, and it often confuses developers.

In short, I had to be willing to do many things differently, even if it meant joining the Viet Cong. I hoped that by freeing my mind of dogma I could produce a system that leveraged the best and most essential features of several approaches.

I began by writing lots of "fake programs". I wanted to be sure that no matter how I implemented the internals, that the software was easy to use, and produced tight code, with an absolute minimum of configuration.