Introducing StormFactory.NET

Paul C Smith — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 01:15:46 GMT

StormFactory aims to be the simplest ORM oriented code generator available, targeting C# applications using a SQL Server datastore. Our goal is to develop a utility with a negligible learning curve, and one which produces code that is extremely portable, scalable, and easily maintained.

Instead of assuming your database tables represent your business entities, StormFactory takes a stored-procedure oriented approach to object relational mapping. This frees front-end developers from caring about the relational details of the database, which is exactly what an ORM tool is supposed to let them do. This gives you the freedom to de-normalize your data into a sensible topography inside stored procedures -- at the database level -- then manipulate and save those entities individually or in sets. Just point StormFactory at a SELECT procedure and watch it go... it will generate an entity representing the procedure's rowset, a data-access class encapsulating a generic collection of the entity, and a SAVE procedure that handles both inserts and updates (or both!) of an individual entity instance or a whole set of them. The entity-specific data-access class can also serialize and deserialize the entity or set to or from XML.

A few rules from the StormFactory bible:

Generated code will have no external library dependencies of any kind
To keep the memory footprint small, Entity classes reference only intrinsic System types
For speed and footprint reasons, data transactions will all be carried out using DataReaders;
no heavyweight objects like DataSets, DataAdapters, DataTables or XmlDocuments will
appear in generated code
Relational databases excel at set-based operations, so developers should not have to loop through collection classes to perform data chores at runtime. StormFactory uses SQLXML to make passing collections of entities around as easy as passing a DataSet is under other design philosophies.
There will be no template languages to learn; C# developers presumably already know C#, so that will be the language of the generator itself
To make code-maintenance easy, generated objects will be produced as partial classes; this lets add all the custom code you want to your objects in separate files without worrying about losing your work the next time you regenerate the objects.

StormFactory will be open-source and free, probably licensed under the LGPL or an Apache-style license. The initial public release is scheduled for mid January, 2008.

StormFactoryDotNET

Introducing StormFactory.NET