Dude, where's my DAL? Dec 18, 2006 11:21
It's extremely frustrating for the Delphi Win32 developer to read blogs like Steve Trefethan's post on DALs. I appreciate Steve sharing his experience with various DALs on .NET, as it led me to SubSonic, which I write about here. But the fact remains that Delphi Win32 doesn't have a modern DAL in the box.
Where is CodeGear's implementation of a DAL? The answer is ECO; and ECO is much more than just a DAL. The problem is that it's .NET only. Gee, that's great, except that most of CodeGear's customer base doesn't use their products for .NET work. TCodeGearFanatics: go ahead, dispute this and offer some anecdotal statements about how you love VCL.NET, and don't mind being 2 years behind the .NET curve, etc.; I've heard it all before, please just accept that you won't convince me that BDS for .NET is a wise choice.
- It's only available in BDS which currently doesn't support 2.0, i.e. it's seriously hamstrung by the rest of CodeGear's glacially agile product cycle.
- There are many free and good quality DAL's for .NET that are "good enough"
- ECO doesn't ship with runtime code (if you don't think this is a big deal, read CodeGear employee Steve Trefethen's comment replying to a suggestion to use ECO: "The requirements of a project I was working on for a client included availability of source code and use of stored procedures which precluded the use of ECO.") If they can't/won't listen to themselves, why should we believe they will listen to us!
Back to talking about the Delphi we all know, love and actually use: Delphi Win32. Why isn't there a decent DAL for Delphi Win32? There are a bunch of third party offerings, but none that really fit my requirements/programming aesthetic (a mixture of ActiveRecord and Row Data Gateway). So what am I left to do? Roll my own.
I'm tired of waiting around for CodeGear to solve this problem. Expect me to be quite mum about this whole development effort because I believe actions speak louder than words. If I do build something that I think is worthy of release, I will do so under a reasonable open source license (most likely MPL) for the entire Delphi Win32 community to use.
And for those that will argue it's not possible to build an ActiveRecord-like DAL with Delphi, I believe you're wrong. If CodeGear doesn't believe they can build one without .NET, I'll give it a go.
Is it just me or does Delphi survive in spite of itself?
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