Object Relational Mappers have a dream. Their dream is that the mechanics of creating, reading, updating and deleting can be abstracted away and need not be thought about.
I have a dream, too. My dream is that the fact that creating, inserting, updating and deleting is going on can be abstracted away and need not be thought about.
The ORM dream has a big ol’ flaw, to the extent that I am sceptical about the use of ORMs in general. The flaw is that the right way to do CRUD operations depends rather heavily on the domain and the application in question.
My dream should not be vulnerable to that particular flaw, though, because I’m trying to abstract away those operations entirely. Or so I thought right up until yesterday, when I realised that since my approach is to first convert the programmer’s code into a form that does have CRUD operations, I’m going to have the ORM problem from then onwards.
And it’s worse, because when you call the CRUD operations yourself you can exercise a fair degree of control over what goes on. When the CRUD invocations are automatically generated, that control would have to be exercised by hints and indirect suggestions.
Bugger.
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