Re: Did I reinvent the wheel?

FROM : Jens Alfke
DATE : Fri May 09 21:42:41 2008

On 9 May '08, at 11:10 AM, Western Botanicals wrote:

> I would like your opinions about the following framework.
> http://www.justingiboney.com/code
>
> Does this framework already exist in cocoa (did I reinvent the wheel)?


It looks like you're doing the same kind of thing as NeXT's EOF 
(Enterprise Object Framework), which is long gone but much of which 
resurfaced in CoreData.

There are a few existing frameworks that do this sort of thing but use 
sqlite to manage local database files. One thing you might consider is 
taking one of those and replacing the parts that use the sqlite3 API 
to talk to your database API instead. I've used Tito Ciuro's QuickLite 
<http://www.webbotech.com/> in the past, and it's pretty good.

> Is this a framework that is used (or likely to be used) in the real 
> world?


In certain types of apps, yes :) I just don't think many people are 
writing these types of apps in Cocoa. This type of enterprise software 
usually seems to be done for Windows, or in Java or as a web service.

Those classes are a start, but they leave all the hard parts as 
abstract methods to be filled in, so I don't think they'd be useful on 
their own to anyone else. Once you implement and debug the whole thing 
it'd be very useful, but that ends up being an object-relational 
mapping framework; I've done that (in C++) and it's really damn hard. 
It would probably be much, much easier to adapt an existing sqlite 
framework like QuickLite instead.

—Jens

PS: I didn't look in detail at all your classes, but I did notice that 
the UUID methods in BusinessObject have leaks.