[Lazarus] [ANN] Xavier for XML — Compatible with FPC and Delphi

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 2017-09-23 12:36, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
> That's actually a step backwards.
> Because it breaks the separation of object and storage.

Of course I would normally agree with that, but if you look at the Java 
annotations in that article - they are not code per-se, but more like 
small code comments - enough to tell the JPA backend what to do. And 
Java's RTTI is chock full of information, so the JPA backend can extract 
exactly what it needs.

eg:
@Entity
public class Person {
  ...
}

That's enough to notify the JPA that the Person class can be persisted 
to a "Person" table.

They also work on the concept that defaults are used. You only add 
annotations if the defaults should not be used. This again minimise 
developer effort tremendously.


> Good for some quick and dirty prototyping, but a potential disaster in the long run.

No more effort that maintaining an external XML mapping file, or 
hard-coded CRUD visitor.


> It suffices that the DBA decides to move (part of) the data for storage, and
> you're dead...

That would break all code I can think of, and would require developer 
effort to resolve no matter what.


Sorry, this is getting a bit off-topic in this mailing list, so I'll 
stop here.


Regards,
   Graeme

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