Re: [mantisbt-dev] Template system status?

[John R. <jr...@le...>]

On 04/01/2009 02:46 AM, Thomas Koch wrote:
> Hi Matt,
>
> FYI. I'm not yet involved with the Mantis project, just a user, but
> started a branch[1] to introduce an object-relational-mapper in the mantis
> codebase.
> The ORM is from the eZ Components[2] library. This library is in scope
> and extend very much like the Zend Framework. It's only superior in code
> quality, documentation and the development process.[3]
> The library also contains a template system[4] with much the same syntax as
> smarty.

I'm not really sure what the point is to moving towards an ORM system. 
The only benefit of ORM is not needing to write any SQL, but it makes 
many tasks either more difficult, or less efficient, and in general does 
really have much benefit at all for the developer.  Either way, you need 
to learn some sort of interface to get at your data.  Any ORM system has 
limitations, and what you learn will only work with that ORM;  SQL works 
nearly the same way on any database system, and is far more flexible and 
powerful because you can specify complex joins and such.

Especially at this stage of API maturity for MantisBT, with the use of 
ADOdb for writing platform-independent schemas and queries, I think that 
migrating to an ORM is taking a step backwards, and wasting a lot of 
development effort that could be better spent elsewhere.

-- 
John Reese
LeetCode.net