I have just won 1 Telerik Premium Collection for .NET Developer with subscription (lucky me!) and was wondering whether the OpenAccess ORM is worth learning? Has anyone thrown away their open source variant and are now using the Telerik ORM tools instead?
Are there any benefits from using the Telerik ORM tools instead of an open source variant?
Any thought suggestions?
BTW I can't wait to start using their RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX!!
I'm a happy telerik customer for more than 5 years. I used their ORM only in one solution and never used an open source ORM.
Throw away the existing one?
NO - if you have no problems and the thing does what it should do I wouldn't change.
That has nothing to do with quality or other aspects of telerik ORM.
It's just a matter of fact that using a new product means to learn new things, solve some solved things again in a different way and so on.
BUT - if you have problems (or must make compromises) with your current product it's sure worth to give it a try.
Without knowing other ORMs I have one clear point why I would try telerik ORM.
It's their (telerik's) outstanding support.
None of my other vendors offers / does what telerik does.
Simply take a look at their forums http://www.telerik.com/community/forums.aspx and you'll see what I mean.
You have a problem - they solve it; and that with very fast response times.
And that's a point you should think about when making a decision about ORM (or any other kind of product).
This is an older post, but I thought I would weigh in.
We recently started using Telerik's SiteFinity product for a client website. It is a very good, developer-oriented tool for creating a web content system without the size or expense of SharePoint or something similar.
We also went with a Cloud solution as Telerik's ORM supports Azure, so thus so does SiteFinity - which uses OpenAccess (ORM) to communicate with its database.
I was very impressed with the speed and flexibility of it all, being my first Cloud (Azure) development project. Telerik's customer support and personal attention is beyond reproach. I have been using Telerik products for years and was not surprised how well it worked.
Two days before the site was to go live everything bombed with a very inexplicable .Net error. As it turns out Microsoft announced they were upgrading their Azure SQL servers starting July, 2011: "This upgrade is also significant in that it represents a big first step towards providing a common base and feature set between the cloud SQL Azure service and our upcoming release of SQL Server Code Name 'Denali'."
(http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/07/13/announcing-sql-azure-july-2011-service-release.aspx)
By its very nature, Cloud servers are upgraded and moved around behind the scenes so you don't have to mess with it. OpenAccess failed to take this into account however, and when our SQL Azure server group was upgraded OpenAccess failed to recognize its version and bombed.
Telerik, of course, was very quick about releasing a patch - but it still took them a few days. We couldn't wait that long, unfortunately, having already lost quite a bit of time just trying to figure out what was going on. The practical result was that I got to work nonstop for two days with no sleep to move the whole thing into a regular .Net solution with Entity Framework 4 as the ORM.
So to answer the question: Is Telerik ORM worth learning and / or better than an open source solution? I agree with the above statement that if you already have an open source solution, it is working well, has good performance, and is intuitive to develop against - absolutely stick with that.
The value of open source is the community that supports it and your ability to make changes to the underlying system if need be. Had my project been based on an open source ORM, I could have changed the code to default to the most recent version of SQL if it finds it is working with a version higher, and problem solved - sleep had.
The value of a product like OpenAccess ORM is that it is in competition with other products, open source or otherwise, and it has to: Perform Well, be customer oriented, have a manual (very important), and be easier than doing it yourself or learn an open source system that may or may not be very intuitive.
Throw in that Telerik's support is top notch, and I would say you could do worse - as long as you are willing to give up some control and have to wait for upgrades / patches to handle things like I described above.
First off I want you to know that I am not Telerik evangelist...
We did moved away from Telerik's ASP.NET AJAX controls only because we desired greater control over the look and feel of our UI (we still use the controls for quick internal solutions), but I must say their products are excellent given the right conditions. Our web product team started to use the Open Access ORM for our solutions and honestly we never looked back. The first reason that comes to mind to choose a Telerik solution is grade A support which has never failed to provide a resolution to a problem regarding any of their solutions with in 24hrs usually including sample code... Although I can usually dig through blogs for hours to find solutions for most of my issues regarding Microsoft technology I must say it is nice to have support when we need it.
I would certainly recommend using the Telerik Open access ORM. I have used Telerik products (eg telerik Ajax/Silverlight) for a number of years and they are best in class and the technical support is second to none. The company makes money by providing software that works.
Unfortunately this does not apply to open source since by definition anything can changed without proper control. All it needs is one duff developer and an entire suite can be rendered useless.
In order to use the products correctly, swiftly, and efficiently, it is necessary to be a highly competent web developer.
I'm one of those people that won a license at a users group meeting. Thankfully I got to experience how crappy this software is without paying for it.
I never got to test the ORM capabilities because the Visual Studio integration failed. Any click on the Telerik menu in VS threw an exception. And the VS item template that was supposed to be installed was not there, so I couldn't even begin to test the functionality.
Don't be fooled by the pretty designer screenshots, they can't even get the installer to work correctly.
Related
I need to choose an ORM for a project and I only have some experience with NHibernate. I have been reading Q&A from StackOverflow, and the most similar to my needs is What ORM for .net should I use?, but I would like to have an answer more adequate to the present products (the link is from 2009) and that also take into account some points of my project.
The easiest solution for me would be to use NHibernate because it is mature, feature rich and I have already used it, but I prefer to choose the best option for the project even if I have to "study" again.
The project is going to start as a core that communicates with SAP. The core has to support standalone and/or co-dependent modules, and each one of them may need to work with its own data from the database. The final step will be to implement the part of SAP that we use. The characteristics I need are the ones from the previous link and here are some more things to have in mind:
I would like to be able to split the data access layer so that a user with one or two modules won't need the whole thing.
A designer would be appreciated.
It will start with about 20-30 tables and, within a couple of years, that number will grow in several hundreds.
The amount of registers per table will vary from two or three to 150000+ (very few).
IT DOES NOT NEED TO BE A ONE PRODUCT SOLUTION. Combinations like NHibernate and Devart Entity Develop are also welcome.
The team for this project will also have students that will have to learn C Sharp and some of them probably don´t know exactly what an ORM is, so it would be great if it is simple or, at least, the basic stuff is not very complex (mixing tons of lambdas, reflection, extension methods, etc.).
The last one is not very important. I hope this is specific enough to avoid been closed (the question I link is still open).
EDIT:
-It is a desktop application.
-Documentation and comunity are also very very important.
The most popular ORM for .Net these days is Entity Framework. It comes from Microsoft, so well documented in MSDN style. And it fits your criteria.
I worked with NHibernate and found that documentation is patchy, inconsistent and sometimes missing. Most of the time I had to use docs for Hibernate which were not for NHibernate, just similar.
EF can do the same things and more than NHibernate, and the latest release have Migrations, which was missing (when I worked with NHibernate).
Consider it Dapper: dapper-dot-net.
Dapper is a pretty simple ORM, developed and used by StackOverflow.
There is a lack of documentation, but that is because of it simplicity. You can find some usage example in the project page or in some websites like this.
I know this is a pretty old question, but I though I would post an answer for anyone who lands here. Check out SQL Data. It is extremely simple to use, very powerful and fits all the OP's requirements.
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Based upon your experience
If you was given the opportunity to set up the development processes for a small development team.
Please detail
The things you would implement, tools, documents, methodology.
And how you would implement these?
I wish to implement the following:
Source Control
Bug tracking database
Formal Spec templates
Code Reviews
Coffee cup meeting (simple quick informal meetings over coffee :) )
Strict Coding convention
Please keep in mind this would be for a C# .NET focused environment.
If you plan on purchasing, or already have purchased, MSDN subscriptions, there is a major change in licensing that plays out in your favor for Team Foundation Server 2010. Server licensing is now included with MSDN, and you are provided with one CAL per subscription. More licensing details are available here.
Team Foundation Server will cover almost all of your needs in one package. I am very preferential to using as few tools to complete a job as possible, which is one of the reasons I recommend that you look into using Team Foundation Server, as well.
Some notes into your specific requirements:
Source Control - One of the primary functions of Team Foundation Server. It works well and easily integrates with AD Groups. We have security groups set up by roles per project and also for roles across projects. A company developer will be a part of the "Developer" SG and the specific SGs that he/she are involved in. This allows us to give them full access to the projects that they are working on and read access to all projects. The system has the benefit of contractors not belonging to a generalist development group - effectively bucketing them into projects.
Bug Tracking Database - Integration with source control is a definite advantage. By using one package, you have an built in relationship between work items and changesets (which you can further enforce by requiring changesets are only created in the context of work items). Work item relationships are very nice - and vary, depending on your template choice. Both Microsoft's SCRUM and Agile templates are well thought out, and have served our needs quite well, to date.
Formal Specification Templates - There are a couple of ways to approach this. You could create a specific work item type for each template and prepopulate some of the content, or if you wanted a more traditional approach, you could store document templates within the project's Document tree (which is, effectively, a document library on the Team Project Portal site).
Code Reviews - Basic functionality like Annotate (or Blame, if you prefer) are built in. Diff Tools are provided, as well - plus you can switch out the diff tools for others if you do not like what ships with it. (Personally, I use DevArt's CodeCompare .) As for the actual review process, I am a fan of TeamReview.
Strict Coding Conventions - StyleCop is a must, in my opinion. As such, I also believe that ReSharper is a must, as well. Providing conventions is one thing, but being able to visibly put them in front of the user is another. Using something like StyleCop for ReSharper will provide real-time feedback on violations of policies. Anything that you want to add that isn't a part of StyeCop can be created via custom rules, and you can actually put the ReSharper configuration for SCFR in TFS, so that it is shared by the team.
Bonus items that you get that you did not explicitly mention:
Build Management - The build tools in Team Foundation Server 2010 are completely overhauled. Now, builds are defined as workflows using Workflow Foundation, but still can be manually manipulated for more complex build scenarios Gated check-ins, often referred to as "buddy builds" help keep bad code out of the trunk.
Test Management - Testers can benefit from the streamlined testing tools in Visual Studio 2010. Automation of CodedUI tests, and the Test Lab Management tools are major strides in the evolution of Visual Studio. Having a tester be able to capture the state of the machine and automatically insert it into a work item is brilliant, and long overdue. Plus, if you end up using the Test Lab tools, actually being able to capture a snapshot of the VM at the moment of the crash is just pure gravy.
Collaboration - Even if you don't plan on using it at first, the Team Project Portals that are created for each Team Project are ripe with opportunity for collaboration. Just for document management and project wikis alone, it is worth its weight in gold.
Reporting - The reports vary with the templates that you use, but most templates have the type of reports that management care about ready to go. Adding new reports is fairly simple, due to the way that the TFS team has presented data in the cube, as well. A little SSRS knowledge will have you creating detailed custom reports in no time, at all.
Planning - You do not mention what type of methodology you are using - but the Agile template has some really nice sprint planning tools built in. You literally launch a sprint planning worksheet from Visual Studio, which opens in Excel, and any changes you make are reflected in TFS. Really works great for a group planning session.
Support - This is one of the most important factors to me. Having all of the above in a single package also means that I only need to go to one vendor for support. It is invaluable to me to be able to have one phone number to call in the rare occasion that something does go wrong, and know that I have the support incidents to cover it already paid for, thanks to my MSDN subscription.
All that being said, TFS does have a bit of a learning curve. Installation and setup are actually quite simple, assuming that you follow the documentation. The learning curve comes from the fact that there is so much to do with TFS. You might not use all of the features, so the amount of time you actually need to spend learning might vary. The native integration with Visual Studio (and Office) do provide a seamless feel, though, that should translate well to the developers using the system.
Source Control: For a .NET environment, Team Server is good stuff. If you want a free solution, I like Mercurial.
Bug Tracking: FogBugz (of course :)
Spec Templates: I think defining these should be a collaborative process between the development team and business units. Start with a very light framework and let them evolve, don't prescribe a massive document that includes information no one ever uses.
Code Reviews: Peer programming time offers this in abundance. Call out good practices to the team- don't use it as a way to humiliate developers in public.
Meetings: I'm an Agile kind of guy, so meetings (standups) should be brief, to the point, and happen every day at the same time.
Coding Conventions: Again, if you have capable developers you shouldn't have to prescribe strict conventions. Agree as a team on basic conventions and address friction points as necessary.
If your team can foot the bill for Team Foundation Server, you'll have most of what you want in one convenient package.
Source Control: Changeset-based configuration control system with full branching support.
Bug tracking database: Work items - configurable, including bug tracking and reports.
Formal Spec templates: Work items - configurable, including requirements (CMMI), scenarios (Agile), custom types, etc.
Code reviews: Work items - track your reviews just like any other TFS piece of work. A review work item ships with the CMMI process template.
Strict coding convention - I've heard of people integrating StyleCop with their check-in policy.
As for coffee cup meetings, you won't need a tool for that. :)
I have a pawnshop CRUD app written 20 years ago with INFORMIX-SQL/SE (DOS) which is currently running on DOS 6.22 within Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 on Windows Vista. I would like to modernize this app with a GUI, SQL-based engine and retain its existing functionality. It doesn't require any networking or multi-user capability. I would prefer a product which is royalty-free.
I also would like to quickly re-write it with as little effort possible. Which tool would you recommend?
I'm debating whether to re-write my INFORMIX-SQL app with I4GL (character-based) or another Windows/GUI-based tool.
My app is very robust and has some incredible features which my users are very happy with. Only obstacle which is keeping me from effectively acheiving market penetration is, believe it, my app is char-based and I would like to duplicate the same functionality with a GUI. My feeling is that its quicker for a user to process a transaction with my char-based app vs. having to focus a cursor with a mouse, but cosmetics is hurting me!
I would like to know specific instances of limitations, bugs or drawbacks of using another development tool before I invest considerable amount of time evaling another product. Answers to this question could save me a lot of time and money!
If you visit www.frankcomputer.com you can view a video-demo of my pawnshop app. (CAVEAT: The website's in Spanish, use google translate to get a more-or-less decent translation of the text. Start the video at the two-minute mark, with 720p resolution and full-screen to best comprehend my app.)
If I were doing it, I would probably choose to write a WPF GUI in C# with a SQL Server Express backend database. An embedded database like SQLite might work as well. But the main reason I would choose that is because that's what I'm most familiar with. Someone else would likely choose something else...
I might also choose ASP.NET MVC and make it a web application if that were an option (you say that multi-user is not required, but I say it's not required yet).
Also, if you're not the one who's going to be developing it (i.e. you're going to hire someone to build it for you) then I would say that you should find the developer first and let them choose (or at least have a say in) the technology. If you choose the technology up-front then you're simply limiting the field of developers who'll be able to work with you and there's really not much point in that.
I'd recommend you use Python with a PostgreSQL backend. Now some will think this is overkill, but after watching your video and reading your site (I had to use a translator), I suspect the added flexibility is something you will truly enjoy by going this route.
The reasons I'd argue for this solution are:
Python and PostgreSQL are both great products with amazing communities when you need them.
Both products have a bright outlook in their development paths. Since you obviously spent a lot of time and effort tweaking SPACE, I'm betting you will do the same over the next 40 years. So, the tools you choose now need to be there for you as you continue your development cycle.
They are both free with friendly licenses.
Cross-platform support.
Scalability. You can use PostgreSQL installed locally and connect via socket or scale it all the way up to several servers using load balanced connection pooling.
Security.
Data integrity. This includes how easy it is to make your whole environment easy to backup and thus easy to restore in the event of a catastrophe.
Whatever tools you end up choosing. I wish you the best in this project. I can tell you are working on something you truly love and that is something more of us should strive for!!
Based upon your answers and your emphasis upon time to make the changes and that you don't seem to want to change the Application at all but it is being forced upon you by then you should certainly evaluate Genero from 4js.
This will allow you to utilise your existing code but provide a nicer looking front-end. You can also maintain a single codebase supporting both character and "Gui" clients.
Choose whatever language and technology is easiest for you. If you need DB access and a short lead time it sounds like Java or Visual Basic would be best. Both have plenty of free tools to get you started.
The top languages tags in StackOverflow are C# (by a long margin), then Java, PHP and DotNet, followed by C++ and Python. Some of that will be skewed by the Joel & Jeff origin of the site, but any of those is more than capable of the task. Personally, I'd go with Java or Python but I don't like being tied to the Microsoft stack.
wxWidgets and QT might be options for the GUI components.
Of the databases, mysql, SQL Server Express or Oracle Express Edition are all free and robust. SQLite is good enough for most single user applications though. I'd put this at the bottom of the 'importance' list. For small-scale single user apps, you should be able to chop and change DB platforms without much hassle. The biggest relevance would be in how you actually backup/copy/restore data in the event of disk failure or corruption.
I am looking for ORM frameworks, came along to NHibernate, Genome, L2S, Entity Framework and now the DataObjects.NET.. So far a I read the documentation it seems pretty cabable, but have you ever tried this ORM?
Any issues/bugs with DO.NET would be approciated :)
I used DataObjects.Net v4.
It supports VS 2010 and .Net 4.0 and it is really good ORM.
It's easy to use and it constructs the database automatically so you do not design the database and reverse engineer it to classes like some other ORMs.
The only thing that was so annoying about it is the Session management and switching mechanism in case of web applications. I think even this is being taken care of in version 4.4 currently under development.
I think you should take a look at LLBLGen Pro as well. I think this is probably the best .NET ORM out there.
Aside from the fact that this question sound a lot like an informercial, there's a big problem with DataObjects.Net - it's dual-licensed as a GPL or commercial w/o evaluation. So the answer is - no, I have not tried it and it is quite unlikely I will try it.
I have no beef with GPL (though I do not like it for various reasons), or dual-licensed products - after all the license choice is a right to the copyright holder. However, I also want to reserve that right for my software as well. I am writing commercial software, which I have no problem releasing as open source, but under a license of my choice. If I am to adopt a new ORM, I want, nay - I need to be able to release a CTP preview of my product to a limited set of customers for real-life testing. And that would mean I either have to splurge the money for DO.Net upfront without knowing whether my investment will benefit me; or I have to release my sources under a license that effectively takes away the control over my app from me and has the potential to ruin my business by commoditizing my product.
Now, if there was a limited evaluation license, say one month noncommercial use, I might consider giving it a quick trial and see how it works.
If a product wants commercial adoption, it needs to have a risk-free way for early adopters to evaluate it.
Does DataObjects.NET support SQL identity columns yet? I abandoned v3 because I couldn't find a way to support identity columns.
I'm investigating technologies with which to develop a medium-scale (up to 100 or 200 simultaneous users) database-driven web application, and someone suggested Morfik. However, outside of the Morfik company I can find practically zero community support - no active blogs, no tutorials, no videos, no books - and this is of some concern (especially when compared to C# / ASP.NET / nHibernate etc support). Deciding between Morfik (untried and not used widely AFAIK) and the other technologies I mentioned (tried, tested, used widely) is becoming a critical issue for my company.
Has anyone had success using Morfik in these kind of circumstances? What kind of performance did you achieve?
Being a Morfik user for the last 2-3 months, trying to do a quite large project. I totally understand your concern.
The community is small, Morfik developers though try to help you and answer almost all your questions. It was one of my concerns before purchasing it, but it's not a big deal actually.
However, it lacks documentation and tutorials. Yes, there is a chm help file, but outdated and lacks in many ways. Not enough examples, you should figure a lot of stuff on your own. But they say, it's Morfik team's one of the first priorities in the upcoming release to enhance the documentation.
We chose not to use Firebird as the db (Morfik supports it natively) and going with Postgresql over ODBC. There are issues to overcome there too. We had to dive in and modify (override) our own security wrapper for postgre etc. But overall, Morfik integrates with it quite fine. You should be prepared to small annoyances though.
We chose to go with Pascal version, as it is the major language the developers use. But, oh I hate Pascal so much :) It had been 10+ years last time I used Pascal and it can be really annoying with the quirky code editor of Morfik.. I miss VisualStudio, or even Notepad++ as editor!
Since we started our app, I see new components and examples released quite frequently. Morfik team invested on a separate team that develop addons for Morfik, which is a good thing.
So, in terms of support (not community but staff) you should not worry. It's still far from being a mature product but it does the job. Our relationship with Morfik is a love and hate one. I am quite sure our big project will be successfully completed with Morfik, and I can do small enterprise solutions with Morfik very (I mean very) fast. But I would also really think again to use Morfik if we do a big project like we are doing now.
I hope I make sense :)
You might try looking at www.morfikwatch.com which a blog dedicated to Morfik. There you will find links to a couple of Morfik user communities. You can then ask around.
We use Morfik for a variety of purposes, all intranet based. We are looking at the migration of all in-house corporate applications being refactored into morfik applications.
Morfik is a new product, and as such, the community is still growing. Although Morfik 1 has been around for awhile, Morfik 2 is the first version that makes it easy to develop plugins and other third party tools. Now there are small websites starting to appear that create plugins and support Morfik. (http://www.pannonrex.com/ for example).
Morfik is in it's infancy yet offers a solution to be found nowhere else. I would recommend it highly. Just give it time and the developer community will appear just as it did for Delphi and the rest.
best regards
Dalton Calford
Distributel Communications
I'm sorry, when I saw 100-200 simultaneous connections, I immediately thought you meant intranet. We average 300-450 concurrent users on our apps, so we do not consider it a internet based app until you look at a possible 5,000+ users.
The design criteria for such a system is very different than a system with under 1000 users.
When you approach such a system, you are looking at a cloud configuration. As our company is a telecommunications company, and we are required by law to meet 5-9's service for our customers, we use firebird in all our back end processes. Although we have used DB2, Oracle and other products in the past, Firebird has either been more reliable or outperformed the others.
With the about to be released Firebird 2.5 (now in rc 2 if you wish to play with it), you can use firebird as it's own middle tier, with one database connecting to multiple other databases to perform both DML and DDL actions. You can have one Firebird database that has no tables whatsoever, just stored procedures, views etc. That database can then surface the data from multiple sources without the client application knowing. As the connection can be dynamically built within the stored procedures, you can have the backend databases change as needed without changing any front end code. This allows you to load balance, have multiple web servers share a single cluster of databases etc.
So, I since Morfik supports Firebird intrinsically, I would say that yes, Morfik can scale well to a larger environment without trouble. As for Firebird support, it has one of the most active user communities on the web.
From the point of view of Morfik, morfik is a great way to generate a web based UI while leveraging your existing developer base without having to learn a series of new languages. But, it currently lets the developer use the tools for n-tier development without getting in the way. I like that. I do not want a tool that tries to be everything and in turn, does nothing well.
best regards
Dalton Calford
Distributel Communications
Something that I am very concerned about is 3rd party components. GWT has a fairly large collection of components. We make extensive use of data grids that need to be data aware and very rich, meaning it needs to be able to do grouping and sub groupings and master detail relationships.
You must also be able to create new groupings on the fly.
We also make use of pivot grids a lot, so we need them as well, and a quick google search doesn't show any components that can compare to what is already available in GWT.
It is a pity though, since the Morfik development environment seems very integrated. The GWT environment is a bit funny to me, since I am used to the Visual Studio and Delphi environments, so the way Eclipse work is a bit foreign to me, especially when adding new components to the different designers and editors in eclipse.
Morfik is quite limited web development environment for a very basic web development. Even if it gives some benefits in the very beginning in long term it will tie you up.
I worked with Morfik for two years, you can undoubtedly make applications fairly quickly for the management that has design and maintenance is literally 3 clicks, but when you want to add a little more robust functionality can become a pain of head, without counting the inconvenience that is to adjust the reports, has little documentation and the components are the majority of paid.
If you want an app in a short time and not very robust Morfik is indicated, if you want something more I do not recommend it.