I decided to chime in again, because I looked at a video, featuring Tim Jarvis' daughter using ECO to produce a homework management application. I strongly suggest that you watch it - but mind you to either use Internet Explorer or download it - since it won't show up in Firefox, you're warned.
Alexandra(Tim's daughter) has done an excellent job using ECO, I strongly recommend you view the video - it's worth it.
For those of you who don't yet know what ECO is, from my fairly superficial knowledge, here is a short description: ECO is, in essence, an Object Persistence Framework.
Yet, it's a full featured one, with lots of goodies, already here and upcoming. It has all the "classics" of such tools, plus a few very nice things like complete integration with the Delphi IDE. This means that you can design your model inside Delphi and then code straight away, even though with time the needed coding becomes less and less(at least for the "average" application).
Let's see the pros and cons.
Pros: It allows you to basically define most things visually, you can have multiple target databases(or persistence media, anyway) and if you're in the higher SKUs, then you get nice little things like data-hubs which, in the end, are a handy way to manage data oriented webservices.
Cons: it's only existing for dotNET. This is, though, a disadvantage only up to a certain point. Let me explain. It's highly unlikely that you'll be using ECO for a desktop application, for the simple reason that it would be fun to see an eco-powered application run on Windows 98, and beleive me, Win98 is still well spread out there.
Instead, you'll be using ECO mainly server side, maybe with SharePoint Services(btw: do you know anyone who can actually use that stuff? I'd have a few questions to ask :-P) or just in an ASP.NET application. dotNET on the server side isn't actually a bad idea, after all a server is supposed to be fast, powerful and all, thus it would make sense to get a higher end machine for a multi-thousands dollars application. Plus, dotNET has the other advantage(server side) to be in a managed environment and if an application happens to have a problem, that's not likely going to bring down the whole server(which is a good thing ) or make it dead crashing.
Plus, having critical applications in a managed environment makes it a lil safer(read: viruses/exploits/etc remarkably more difficult) even though this doesn't substitute
basic security precautions(like: why let anybody do anything in a webservice without
being logged in?).
Well, since I'm at it, I'll also be commenting a bit about DeXter :-)
I know Borland since... uhm... be it 1991 maybe, when I started programming.
I've always thought Borland had brilliant development tools, even though I
really didn't like the most recent strategies very much(read: Kylix 4 needs to be
produced :-)).
Since Delphi 8, though, things got really, really, really scary.
Much scarier than in the past. This is because of several reasons, imho:
- First of all, because not many Delphi programmers trust Microsoft(yes, I'm in that camp)
- Secondly, because MS is trying to impose something(dotNET) in both server and client machines, which means throwing a fairly big amount of code really out of the window.
- Thirdly, since MS has $100 million shares in Borland, all this sounded like the final death of Borland as an independent company
- Fourthly, because Delphi 8 was really awful according to many commenters(I didn't buy it, thus I don't know first hand)
It's maybe the first time that Borland actually does one in 14 yrs(that I know of).
Actually, there also were the barbarian updates from Allen Bauer for Delphi 2005 which made the product even more enjoyable than the three patches(which had already made it quite enjoyable). Those are also already available in DeXter, acutally the D2005 ones are a backport, thus things should have been vastly improved in that respect.
Plus, there'll be an ECO "lite" version even in Pro SKU, which is appealing for me.
Anyway, time will tell what Borland was able to do and if it's worth being with them.
Considering that there even is a CompactFramework preview compiler for Delphi 2005, things just look right.
What to say... I'm eagerly waiting and if I can manage I'll be surely getting a Software Assurance as well - according to the roadmap it should be very good value :-)
Bye,
Andrew
1 comment:
ECO is more than an OPF (Object Persistence Framework). Indeed ECO has a very powerful OR mapping sub system, but that's not all. The main benefit (some would say) is the business object layer, which is kept in technical consistency by the framework, and allows you to navigate through your object world relying on the lazy fetch mechanisms of ECO. ECO also allows using OCL to specify derived attributes and relations as well as constraints. OCL can also be used to navigate and subscribe to changes within your objects.
As an added bonus, ECO has a presentation layer that fits snuggly into .Net data binding mechanisms, allowing you to use standard (or third party) components to build your UI.
Maybe the sinle most 'special' thing of ECO is that it's model centric. You design your objects in a UML class diagram, code gets generated for you, persistence is model driven (no code required!) as is presentation.
--Jesper
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