Ayende @ Rahien

Frans Bouma commented on NHibernate Tooling Review: LLBLGen Pro 3.0

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 17:13:41 GMT

yeah, I wasn't suggesting one should hammer out the classes up front, but along the way the time spent on the overhead adds up. :) If you start out with a couple of entities and it grows and grows, you will even more run into time consumed with changing plumbing code/mappings/tables. Though an interview with a domain expert already gives you a lot of ideas and insights in what entities you can recognize in the problem domain and how they likely relate to each other. How they look in detail (which fields, which types these fields might have etc.) that's the detail which is filled in along the way. That's also the focus of quickmodel, the text-based DSL system in llblgen pro v3: you can sit down with the domain expert, interview him/her and type in facts, like customer 1n order. The model grows visually and in the project and the domain expert can see how things relate. How things are filled in in detail, can be done later, e.g. grouping of fields in value types, that's not something you'd want to do directly up front, so a more top-down approach but that alone already forces you to focus on what the problem domain is all about and what you can recognize in it. I don't think that's a bad thing.

Ayende Rahien commented on NHibernate Tooling Review: LLBLGen Pro 3.0

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 16:40:38 GMT

Frans, I am not sure that I agree with your math. I certainly agree on the value of tools :-), but writing 50 entities up front is something that is usually common in BDUF scenarios. If you are doing that, it isn't going to matter _how_ you are doing it. You are going to waste a lot of time without a lot of knowledge of the application itself. It is much more common to do 1 - 3 entities at a time. The cost is still real, but it is amortized over a lot longer. I am less concerned about the cost, actually, what I care about is the frustration factor of having to go through seven different steps to get something done. Tools can cut that much more easily. And considering the sub 500$ that most tools cost, it is only a few days of work even if you make 20$ - 30$ / hr.

Frans Bouma commented on NHibernate Tooling Review: LLBLGen Pro 3.0

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 14:43:49 GMT

@mattmc3: I don't know how much you make per hour, but even if it's in the range of 20$/hour it's easy to gain it back. The thing is: if you for example have a 50 entity system, you need to create the DB, all 50 classes and 50 mapping files (or less if you use inheritance), debug them, and then you can start working on your client's system functionality. I don't know how much code you can write in an hour, but I bet you can't write 50 mapping files, 50 class files and create the DB without a single error in 1 hour, so it will likely take you a while, say a couple of hours. Or do you think the time you have to spend on all that is 'not time spend on the client's project' ? I'm not your client, so if you want to spend many hours doing dull work, which can be taken over by a machine, be my guest. if your competition can do it quicker with less problems due to advanced tooling, you're not competitive anymore and will lose work. Maybe not overnight, but everything counts: the more time you have to spend on overhead, the less time you can spend on the actual project unless you file more billable hours. I don't care whether you buy my work or not, I just find it wrong to state that writing a lot of plumbing code is 'free'. It's not.

mattmc3 commented on NHibernate Tooling Review: LLBLGen Pro 3.0

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 13:35:40 GMT

@Frans - Thankfully, the choice isn't between expensive tools or no tools at all as you suggest.

James Gregory commented on NHibernate Tooling Review: LLBLGen Pro 3.0

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 08:19:12 GMT

Ayende: I'll admit debugging is a bit of an issue with a more verbose XML output; however, "outputting every single option" is a bit of an exaggeration.

Frans Bouma commented on NHibernate Tooling Review: LLBLGen Pro 3.0

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 07:16:49 GMT

@mattmc3: As it can do things in a minute you have to spend hours on manually by writing the mapping files/classes by hand, creating the DB by hand (if you're working model first), you're saving a lot of time, you can spend on other parts of the project. This makes you spend less time on a project so you're less expensive for your client. As you spend less time on the project, you can do more projects, and make more money. Also, if your competition uses tooling for plumbing (because that's what mapping / entity classes are) and you don't, you have a disadvantage. In the end it comes down to: do you want to invest a little money to save money. Whether that's worth it is of course up to you, but it's not as if spending the money on it is not giving any financial gain, on the contrary. Similar to tools like Oren's *Prof tools: they make it way easier to get insight in what's going on in your software and with that cutting down time spend on tracking down issues you'd otherwise spend considerable time on and always on the least convenient moments.

Ayende Rahien commented on NHibernate Tooling Review: LLBLGen Pro 3.0

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 03:34:08 GMT

James, The problem with FNH mapping is that when there is a problem, that is how you debug it. That is why I find it annoying that FNH is outputting every single option

mattmc3 commented on NHibernate Tooling Review: LLBLGen Pro 3.0

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 02:36:32 GMT

LLBLGen seems to have a huge and loyal following. Thought, I've personally never seen anything that made me feel like it justified its steep price. This post, while interesting, has not changed that.

James Gregory commented on NHibernate Tooling Review: LLBLGen Pro 3.0

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:26:16 GMT

Nice review. This is actually the first time I've had a good look at LLBLGen, so thanks for that. Being that Fluent NHibernate is my doing, I feel I have to comment on this: "There are still some things to improve, but compare that to the output of Fluent NHibernate, and you’ll see that this is generating something that is much easier to work with." To be fair, it's was never the intention of Fluent to create XML for user consumption, it purely does it to satisfy NHibernate. Minor point though, and I'm only being pedantic. Good review, I'm looking forward to the other tools.

Frans Bouma commented on NHibernate Tooling Review: LLBLGen Pro 3.0

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 17:05:49 GMT

@Jesus It's about maintainability and what's the 'source' of the entity class + table: the abstract entity definition. Everything is derived from that: the entity class and the target table(s). As they're reflecting the same definition, one can define a mapping between them and allow transportation of an instance of such an abstract entity definition (== data) flow from class instance to table and back. changing the entity definition therefore has its reflection on class and table and thus mappings. that's why using a tool for that is beneficial: it keeps these elements in sync for you.

Jesus Bolivar commented on NHibernate Tooling Review: LLBLGen Pro 3.0

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 16:07:41 GMT

I prefer to write XML, I don't know why but it feels like a more natural way to map classes

NC commented on NHibernate Tooling Review: LLBLGen Pro 3.0

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 14:51:01 GMT

"There are still some things to improve, but compare that to the output of Fluent NHibernate, and you’ll see that this is generating something that is much easier to work with." Disagreed. I don't know how people can still tolerate working with XML. Fluent is the only reason I ever went back to NH, because it was absolutely painful having to write XML.

Phil Scott commented on NHibernate Tooling Review: LLBLGen Pro 3.0

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 14:43:49 GMT

Guys at my office often forget the name of the product and refer to it as the "LL Bean thingy"

Alan Schrank commented on NHibernate Tooling Review: LLBLGen Pro 3.0

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 13:35:17 GMT

I've used LlblgenPro for many years with great success. Now v3 supports not only the LlblgenPro runtime but NHibernate, Entity Framework v1 and v4 and Linq2Sql. I'm starting to work with NHibernate for the first time. Looks like my long time tool will help me as I do.

Frans Bouma commented on NHibernate Tooling Review: LLBLGen Pro 3.0

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 09:41:18 GMT

Short comments: "* Kick all the access=”field.camelcase-underscore” to the default-access on the