Saturday, November 18, 2006

Mapping panacea

To paraphrase the golden hammer saying, I have the feeling that nowadays, because you have object mapping frameworks, everything looks like an object!

What is it with developers who seem to get infatuated with such tools? Does everything need to be mapped to objects? Of course not! Here two recent cases that kind of drive me nuts:

  • Why reading XML files when I can map them to objects? Well, maybe because what you are looking for is actually... data. So please save your application from the miseries of JAXB 1.x (which does not even care to mandate a clear concurrent behavior in its API) and use SAX, XPath or any other efficient XML reading tool!

  • Why querying the database when I can map it to objects? Well, maybe because you are performing batch operations that are mainly data retrieving oriented and the overhead your O/R mapper will add plus its memory consumption will put your virtual machine on its knees. So please take the fast lane!
End Of Rant.