Welcome to nORM

This brand new blog is where I (Andrew Matthews) and any other volunteers that join the project will post on issue involved in the production of nORM.

As the name suggests nORM is another .NET ORM system. The open source market seems to be flooded with them, so why release another? nORM started out life as a piece of infratsructure for a project I did a few years back when there wasn’t anything worth having in the .NET market. I had just finished doing some Java development for a client using Torque and had found it such a labour saving device that I didn’t feel I could live without it. When I moved over to C# I couldn’t find anything comparable so I developed one based on the designs publicised by Scott Ambler. The ORM had a very powerful and extensible code generation system that allowed me to generate everything from SQL statements, entities and remoting specifications to basic datagrids for ASP.NET. All in all I was very impressed with what it did, but even more enthused with what was possible in a productised system.

In a subsequent project for Avanade and LloydsTSB share Registrars I was involved in choosing an ORM system that would see really huge transaction rates. As an exercise, and not really expecting it to rate very highly, I included my old ORM system in the comparison, and was pleasantly surprised to find that rather than being a rank outsider, it came out just shy of the leaders in my comparisons. I didn’t use it, because of the lack of support (I have just moved to the other side of the world!) but it made me realise that nORM could be a world beating system that could if productised be an essential tool in any .NET developers arsenal of APIs.

The core code generation system is potentially usable in a variety of other applications as well - I used it to great effect in AabsDbc (http://www.sf.net/projects/aabsdbc).

So I decided that I don’t have time to do it all by myself (I have twins on the way, and can’t see myself having the brain-power to get much coding done in my spare time for a year or so) so I’m opening it up to the world, in the hope that there are people out there who DO have the time, and interest to get into developing a good ORM system. God knows, there’s plenty yet to do!