Re: Database Application with Obj-C
Re: Database Application with Obj-C
- Subject: Re: Database Application with Obj-C
- From: Chris Hanson <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 15:26:26 -0600
On Dec 23, 2003, at 9:36 AM, Kim Friesen wrote:
This topic seems to come up consistently. I'm curious as to why EOF
or SQL Libraries are the first things to be discussed.
SQL is just a language for communicating with relational databases.
EOF comes up because it was the persistence framework included with Mac
OS X Server and available for OpenStep, and it worked *very* well
there.
Is it because of Legacy databases that people want to connect to?
External reporting tools ? Interoperability ? I'm not sure that for a
new standalone or relatively small multiuser application that I would
like to have an unnecessary binding between my model objects and a
relational schema unless it buys me something significant.
What a framework like EOF gets you is semi-transparent persistence for
your business objects. The fact that it does it by talking to any of a
number of relational databases is just an added bonus. (That's in the
common case, EOF adaptors have been written for other data sources too;
WebObjects 5.1 and later include a JNDI adaptor for example, and there
was a flat-file adaptor in the past...)
I say semi-transparent persistence because you do still have to do some
work to create persistent business objects. You have to use EOModeler
to describe them and how they map to your data source, for example.
You also have to use some additional API to manage your objects.
The thing is, this management is stuff you have to do anyway -- undo
support, saving, maintaining referential integrity, validation, that
sort of thing. So you may as well use a framework that does it for you
(possibly leveraging a common back-end).
-- Chris
--
Chris Hanson <email@hidden>
Weblog:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/chanson/
Resume:
http://bdistributed.com/people/cmh/resume.html
Looking for work developing Java or Mac OS X applications
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