I was having a discussion the other day in regards to connecting to databases and using stored procedures and such, then I was told that Ado.Net is outdated and not really being used, but everywhere you look for solutions on connecting with SQL or interacting with SQL that everyone is still using Ado. I was told that the days of using Ado is long gone and now its entity framework that is being widely used. Is this because fewer people are learning Ado? Or is it for a separation of programmers and Sql developers?
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I've spent the last couple of months on and off with CFwhees.
There's a lot it has going for simplicity, but I always come up against an issue or two that I have a hard time troubleshooting. Biggest of them is to get a many-many relationship to work properly.
I'm switching between two environments Railo/mySQL and CF/MsSQL so it would be nice if it could work on both.
I'm trying to roll out a web application in a limited amount of time, as I've spent already too much time on CF wheels.
Can anyone recommend a framework that will make creating many-many relationships and the related CRUD easy and has a big community?
Some of the one's I've seen mentioned frequently are MachII, FuseBox, Model-Glue, ColdBox
Most of those frameworks you list do not have built-in ORM like wheels does. This means you'll be either using straight SQL queries or the CF9(Hibernate) ORM. I think it is only fair to mention that both of those options are also available for CFWheels.
I've written a fairly large app in CFWheels. In my app there were several instances of many-to-many relationships, and I was able to make it work without too much pain. That being said, I have felt your frustration with the CFWheels ORM. It can be clunky once you get to complex relationships. In those cases, I've had to make a judgement call as to whether it was worth it to try to build a query using the ORM, or just build a custom SQL query and store it in the CFC for my model. In fact, for 99% of my report queries for this app, I just resorted to writing the SQL in the model. But for CRUD operations, this wasn't really a limiting factor.
I'm curious what specific problems you're experiencing with Wheels - care to post an example?
yes the orm in cfwheels can be buggy at times. if you encounter a bug or even what you THINK might be a bug, we want to know. please take the time to file a bug report so we can investigate. that all being said, i'm very surprised that the CF community hasn't taken noticed about Don Humphrey's ORM called CFRel. It's probably one of the biggest things to happen to CFML since fusebox.
Oh... and there is even a cfwheels plugin for it.
i've been developing a asp mvc website for almost a year now exclusively on mongodb. i've loved it for the most part. development productivity has been great using a C# mongodb driver and tools like mongovue.
however, i've started to reach a point where there are things i really wish i had a SQL server database for. simple tasks like updating a record in the DB and only mildly complex queries to generate some type of report are becoming a pain.
i read an article somewhere that in order for NOSSQL to succeed there needs to be a standard query language for it, and tools developed around it. i'm guessing this is far far away, so right now i'm stuck trying to deal with these things.
i think eventually i will have to have a dual solution with monogDB and sql server. i don't think i will ever get to the point where i am as productive updating and writing queries for mongoDB as i was with sql server.
how are you guys dealing with this when using NOSQL like mongodb? are you facing the same issues as me?
One solution you may consider is LINQPad. You can set up a template with a reference to 10Gen's drivers and write ad-hoc, C# MongoDB queries like you would in your code. My team and I use this method to address the very problem you mention.
Try it out (it's free) and see if it can help with the simple, day-to-day queries you come up with.
Edit I also support Chris's suggestion of familiarizing yourself with the native JSON query language. Nothing beats a quick console window for speed, if you know the syntax.
The official C# driver will probably get a LINQ provider some time in the future, so that'd give .NET devs a familiar syntax for querying and maybe help with initial productivity. There're also some nice docs that help relate MongoDB queries back to SQL:
SQL to Mongo Mapping Chart
SQL to MongoDB (PDF)
These are great for learning, but to get the most out of Mongo it's well worth investing time getting used to the native JSON query syntax and Mongo-specific concepts like map-reduce.
Since your questions asks,
how are you guys dealing with this when using NOSQL like mongodb?
I thought I'd chime in. I felt your pain when working with another NOSQL database, RavenDB.
I wrote a Linqpad driver specifically for ad hoc interactions with RavenDB.
https://github.com/ronnieoverby/RavenDB-Linqpad-Driver
When Linq-to-Sql was first released, I used it quite a lot for small and medium sized projects where a true multi-tier architecture wasn't required.
NHibernate, Small Middleware, Overkill
Where I work, we now almost exclusively use NHibernate for true Domain Driven development.
I'm working on a small temporary (a lifetime of probably a year, maybe less) middleware component where NHibernate feels slightly overkill in terms of configuration and keeping the entities up to date. Especially because I haven't got any control over the DB, it sometimes changes, and it's a little bit "legacy".
Some changes were recently made to the DB, and the NHibernate mappings are not very complete.
Linq-to-Sql? Or EF?
I thought it might be easier just to rip out the IRepository implementation I have and replace it with a Linq-to-Sql implementation. Then I can just use lambdas for my simple queries, and just drag and drop the tables in.
RAD But Dead?
In this scenario the RAD elements of Linq-to-Sql make sense. But it's essentially old technology. Should I not use it? I've never used the Entity Framework. Should I use that, is it as easy and quick to use?
cheers
Is it still OK to use Linq-to-sql?
Yes. It is OK to use any technology which allows you delivering the product in time, with required functionality and quality. You can still find projects using ASP, ADO, VB6. One reason why Microsoft technologies have very hard time in many international corporations is that their products have very short lifetime. Linq-to-sql was on the market less then 2 years and was deprecated by Microsoft but companies / community argued about that and Microsoft changed their strategy little bit. Linq-to-sql doesn't have new features but it is still supported and a fully functional technology.
Will Linq-to-sql or EF solve your problems?
It depends. Perhaps yes and perhaps no. Don't believe to marketing announcements about RAD. Sometimes I feel that people think that RAD is about designer. No. Tools supporting RAD are about well defined API which is easy to understand, easy to use and doesn't contain unexpected behavior (Principle of least surprise) - you will use the API to quickly prototype the application but it still requires understanding and practice. NHibernate's mapping is still prototyping when you compare it with manually doing whole data access. We can even follow the basic rule of good framework: Easy things are easy to do and hard things are possible. That is something that NHibernate accomplish much better then EF or Linq-to-sql.
If you know NHibernate but you don't have any real world experience with EF or Linq-to-sql, you can be sure that neither Linq-to-sql or EF will increase your productivity in first one or two projects where you use it. If you don't have too much experience with NHibernate changing to EF or Linq-to-sql will probably don't cause temporary lose of productivity.
I also don't think that EF or Linq-to-sql will generally help you in situations where database changes. As I remember Linq-to-sql designer doesn't have update mapping functionality at all and because of that it is very often used completely without designer so you must still manually modify mapping. EF's updating model from database can be helpful here but it is not a silver bullet. Some updates can require manual modification of EDMX file (huge XML).
At last be aware that NHibernate's mapping features are much more powerful especially when working with legacy databases. Linq-to-sql's mapping features are very limited, it is mostly 1:1 mapping of tables to classes with some exceptions (basic TPH inheritance). EF offers more complex mapping features but it somehow expects a correct design of the database.
If you (and your coworkers) are comfortable with NHibernate, then it should be just as RAD as Linq to SQL. There's no reason not to use L2S as long as you understand it's not going to get much in the way of updates and improvements from Microsoft, but in my experience if you know how to use both frameworks already, no need in re-doing the work just because L2S might be a little more RAD
Some good discussion on NHibernate vs L2S/EF
Entity Framework vs LINQ to SQL
MS Entity Framework VS NHibernate and its derived contribs (FluentNHibernate, Linq for NHibernate)
in your specific case, you should go with technology you are most comfortable with. Though Linq2Sql is relatively straight forward - and build right into the language - it does have a slight learning curve and its own set of gotchas!
So far I did not like EF. Although I liked the tools and how easy it was to create certain types of mappings and relations, Other types were a pain and the Linq support in EF wasn't so great (couln't create my own filter extension methods).
Is the new EF in .Net 4.0 better. Given what I have stated so far is there a chance I will like it.
The reson I ask this is because I use linq2sql a lot and do not like the feeling that the platform I am using is about to go obsolete. I would like to upgrade to something that is as similar as possible to what I already have.
Thanks for your opinions
It's only an opinion, but I believe that the new EF will be much improved. They will almost certainly have some kind of migration path from Linq to SQL. Whether it will look like Linq to SQL is another story. The two tools have somewhat different philosophies.
While EF will be designed for enterprise scenarios, it is my hope that the next version will still be lightweight enough to serve as an adequate replacement for L2S in small application scenarios.
I am really optimistic about EF 4.0 from all that I have seen thus far. The beta release is already available to MSDN subscribers and it addresses a lot of the concerns around POCO, Persistence Ignorance, N-Tier support and all that. I continue to recommend reading the ADO.NET team blog as a great resource for what's changed.
You can't compare it to the first release because this is a very big overhaul and a lot has changed.
That said, initial adopters always get the worst of it because they are the first to run into bugs and new problems while the late comes can benefit from the lessons learnt by the early adopters.
There has been a lot of improvements. I have ran in to a couple of strange issues but nothing unsolvable yet. It took me a few hours to understand how POCO works meaning they spent a lot of. I recommend you download VS2010 and play around with it yourself!
Have a look at this presentation, and you will know why EF worth your time.
How to Think Like the Entity Framework Presentation: http://blogs.teamb.com/craigstuntz/2009/09/11/38394/
I was listening to a podcast recently that was discussing at length the short comings of Entity Framework (EF).
But, their opinions may need to be taken with a grain of salt (by me), as from what I could gather:
These were folks that were ORM experts.
They either made their living off of ORM tools, or their hobby
They were using ORM tools for large scale applications
They were also very concerned with the uber-tactics of ALT.NET that I'm not necessarily concerned with (YET)
My overall question is:
For what type of project is Entity Framework currently suited?
But here are a few sub-questions that may help you get where I'm headed with that question:
Is EF better than nothing? I'm tired of doing everything by hand.
Does it come close to "solving the same problem" as LINQ to SQL? 2a. If yes, when would one be suited over the other? * found a thread on this question as I was going over questions with this tag, so nevermind *
Does it lend itself to simple 'quick and dirty' applications, such as when the bulk of your administrative CRUD forms?
edit: for those that might be curious, I am mostly working on small to medium sized applications. That can guide your response, or not.
The Entity Framework is suitable for all applications which would benefit from having an ORM layer. Daniel Simmons post goes into detail on this.
http://blogs.msdn.com/dsimmons/archive/2008/05/17/why-use-the-entity-framework.aspx
Entity Framework is similar in many ways to Linq for SQL but is not tied to MS SQL Server which Linq for SQL is. In addition EF supports more flexible mapping between your business/domain objects and the data tables. Linq for SQL supports more of a one to one mapping whereas EF supports ability to map a single object to multiple tables, or a single table to multiple objects. You do have decent designer support in both.
In the open source world, NHibernate is probably the most advanced and in many ways is the more mature product (it certainly supports a wider array of features to some regard). But with EF you get the full support of MS and the close integration into the visual studio toolset and .net framework stack. EF also as a better Linq profider than NH at the time of writing.
For a quick and dirty application i would lean towards Linq for SQL to be honest, if you can live with MS SQL Server and the mapping restrictions.
For a more complex application i would use EF or NHibernate.
You might be interested in a vote of confidence post i gave on the EF
http://blog.keithpatton.com/2008/06/24/A+Vote+Of+Confidence+For+The+Entity+Framework.aspx