Thoughts on iBatis?
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I recently joined a company that seem to make extensive use of iBatis[^]. Their (the company I joined) products have been written in Delphi & have used different databases for their apps over the years (mostly Interbase and Firebird as far as I can tell). Part of my function here is to rebuild all their products in .NET using SQL Server 2005 as a backend. The previous senior dev (who left before I got here) seems to have had tremendous faith in iBatis but I have had no experience with it whatsoever. I've done some research & read up on it but I'd like to hear from people on the frontline who've actually used it - what do you think of it?
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I recently joined a company that seem to make extensive use of iBatis[^]. Their (the company I joined) products have been written in Delphi & have used different databases for their apps over the years (mostly Interbase and Firebird as far as I can tell). Part of my function here is to rebuild all their products in .NET using SQL Server 2005 as a backend. The previous senior dev (who left before I got here) seems to have had tremendous faith in iBatis but I have had no experience with it whatsoever. I've done some research & read up on it but I'd like to hear from people on the frontline who've actually used it - what do you think of it?
Are you working with it? Sounds interesting.
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
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Are you working with it? Sounds interesting.
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
I've actually since left the company & didn't end up using it much after all. Pity tho, as it does seem to have potential. The basic "gist" of it (for want of a better word) is that it'd allow you independence from any particular RDBMS (which is particularly useful to small ISV's I'd say). That's the upside - the downside is that it does require a significant time investment to get a decent, reusable DAL API that you could plug in to the various incarnations of one's project. The reason I didn't get to use it as much as I would have liked to is that the project I was working on was way behind schedule and my team wasn't afforded enough time to get it (an iBatis DAL) up & running. Besides that, the company decided that they would be working exclusively with SQL Server in the future, and as such, the abstraction provided by using iBatis didn't provide any significant benefits. I ended up building a lightweight DAL that could be applied to pretty much any SQL Server database with only a little extra code involved (setting up SQL parameters for specific objects). Other than that it does the job pretty well. Good article fodder were I eloquent enough :)
But fortunately we have the nanny-state politicians who can step in to protect us poor stupid consumers, most of whom would not know a JVM from a frozen chicken. Bruce Pierson
Because programming is an art, not a science. Marc Clifton