My friend Bill points out that ObjectSpaces has been delayed until Longhorn. I could be wrong, but I sense the initial enthusiasm for ObjectSpaces is waning. So now I’m pondering:

Do we need O/R mappers anymore? Did we ever?

At the risk of sounding like someone who thinks SOA will solve all of the world’s problems, I want to spend some time testing the following hypothesis:

Does a service-oriented architecture diminish the need for an O/R mapper?

SOA changes not only the way we build our back-end services, but also the way we build our front-ends. In a recent conversation with Rocky Lhotka, he made the point that in an SOA, the client and the service are really separate applications – separated by a trust boundary. He also pointed out that invoking a service is a lot like invoking a stored procedure: 1) construct a request by filling in some parameters, 2) invoke a named operation, and 3) handle the response.

Clemens has posted recently about something he calls data services. In short, he makes the case for accessing your data through a service.

Continuing these thoughts, I’m now asking, “Can a service be akin to a smarter stored procedure?” If you look at it this way, you can write your ‘stored procedures’ in C# without Yukon

In an SOA, the client has its own layers (presentation, business, data) as does the service. But the client’s data layer does not necessarily connect to a database, It might just connect to a service. This gets to my reasons for asking whether we need O/R mappers:

·       The client’s business layer no longer needs to map to a relational database. Instead, it needs to map to service requests and responses.

·       If the service itself is a ‘smarter stored procedure’, does it need a rich domain model? If not, it doesn’t need to map this domain model to a relational model.

I’m writing more questions than answers in this post, but here’s one more:

·       If we really needed O/R mappers, wouldn’t we already have them? Yes, I know a number of vendors already sell O/R mappers, but if they were so vital, wouldn’t they be built into the fabric of every platform by now? I mean, saving objects into a relational database is something we’ve been doing for a long time. If O/R mappers were really the answer, wouldn’t this be a solved problem by now?

I’ve been avoiding the ‘about me’ post until I first contributed some content to this blog. I didn’t want the inaugural entry to tell you what an interesting guy I was, only to be followed by the dead silence that comes from having nothing else to say.

But now that I’ve written a few entries, I’d like you to read them. And if I expect you to take interest in my writing, it’s only fair that I tell you a bit about me.

Like Eric Sink, I’m not a software legend. I haven’t written any books. You probably haven’t heard me give a talk. I don’t live in California or Washington. I live in Wisconsin. Yes, Wisconsin.

But if your home contains an item from the largest consumer products company in the world (Pringles, Puffs, or Tide to name a few), know that I helped design and construct the software that moved that product off the production line, through the warehouse, onto the truck, and into your local retailer. The next time you reach for the Charmin, think of Terski. If you own a pair of shoes with a swoosh on them, it’s possible that they were conveyed, sorted, and packed by software that I helped design, build, and deploy (along with this guy).

I spent the first era of my software career building logistics execution software for big clients. In those days I learned hard lessons about performance, scalability, and reliability. Nothing says, “Your software sucks,” quite like a stream of boxes falling off the end of a conveyor or semi-trucks backed up for two miles waiting to be diverted to the right dock door.

During this time, I got excited about the Booch notation – and later the UML. I thought these design notations were a key to advancing software engineering’s state-of-the-practice. Ironically, core development team for Rational Rose was located about two miles from where I was working at the time (yes, in Wisconsin). When I found this out, I got myself hired by Rational and began the second era of my career.

I spent the next few years working on Rose and its successor, XDE. I liked being at Rational and worked with some great people. But admittedly, I grew somewhat disillusioned with the UML and the efficacy of the modeling tools of the day.

So in 2002, I started the third era of my career when I co-founded Serlio Software with three of my colleagues from Rational. I’ll spare you the sales-pitch, but at Serlio we’re passionate about software engineering and the .Net development platform. My current technical interests include service-oriented architectures and rules-based systems (a.k.a. rules engines).

I’ll blog about these topics and more. I hope you’ll stick around.