Been Caught Stealing
Jeremy Miller writes, “if you’re writing ADO.Net code by hand, you’re stealing from your employer or client,” in his How to Design your Data Connectivity Strategy post last month on CodeBetter.com.
Guilty as charged
When we first started laying the groundwork for Infovark, we assumed that our back end would be a full-fledged Enterprise Content Management system. It was only later, once we realized that Infovark required a separate object persistence layer on the client side, that we began thinking about data storage.
Now, there were dozens of object-relational mapping tools available. From our perspective, though, they all shared a common flaw: We didn’t know how to use any of them.
Old dogs avoiding new tricks
Gordon and I got started in web development back in the “classic ASP” days. We knew how to work with ADO.NET. We had battled with object-relational impedance before, and had the scars to prove it.
So after gazing longingly at ActiveRecord and NHibernate, we decided to roll our own data access layer.
Months later, after much refactoring, we finally have a reasonably solid platform on which to build our application. It’s something we might have had in the first six weeks, had we done our homework.
But Infovark is an unusual project. We were having to learn many, many new things at the start. The thought of adding to the pile of books to read and websites to scan… especially when it was something we actually knew how to do…
What can we say? We fell prey to temptation. We promise we won’t do it again. It’s the straight and narrow from now on.
