Comments on: Choose your ORM: Runtime, code generation or build provider? http://damieng.com/blog/2006/08/29/choosing_your_orm_runtime_vs_code_generation A .NET developer in Redmond Tue, 06 Jan 2009 04:04:45 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7 hourly 1 By: steve http://damieng.com/blog/2006/08/29/choosing_your_orm_runtime_vs_code_generation/comment-page-1#comment-1608 steve Thu, 31 Aug 2006 11:55:15 +0000 http://damieng.com/blog/archive/2006/08/29/choosing_your_orm_runtime_vs_code_generation.aspx#comment-1608 We use code generation (and our project is several years old tech now), but lately projects like Hibernate have made a strong case that you don't really need it. Yes, they need reflection, but since you pre-declare your mappings it is an initialisation-time task to build a serialisation plan, so at runtime it can be very efficient if the code & data metadata structures are well thought out. It also saves memory when you have very large entity sets, and there are arguments that a smaller core set of serialisation routines with well-organised mapping data can actually be beneficial, in that they're cache-friendly and it's easier to add features like cluster awareness.<br /><br />I've never played with Hibernate myself since we have our own code generation option, but I know people who have used it and swear by it (not about it, luckily). Not sure how good the NHibernate version is, I don't know anyone who uses that at the moment, but perhaps worth a look.<br /> We use code generation (and our project is several years old tech now), but lately projects like Hibernate have made a strong case that you don't really need it. Yes, they need reflection, but since you pre-declare your mappings it is an initialisation-time task to build a serialisation plan, so at runtime it can be very efficient if the code & data metadata structures are well thought out. It also saves memory when you have very large entity sets, and there are arguments that a smaller core set of serialisation routines with well-organised mapping data can actually be beneficial, in that they're cache-friendly and it's easier to add features like cluster awareness.

I've never played with Hibernate myself since we have our own code generation option, but I know people who have used it and swear by it (not about it, luckily). Not sure how good the NHibernate version is, I don't know anyone who uses that at the moment, but perhaps worth a look.

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