NHibernate – a Quality ORM?
[This is a flame. If you are an NHibernate fan, please stop reading now, you’ll only upset yourself otherwise.]
Like many others I subscribe to the codebetter.com RSS feed. One of the members feels that its their personal responsibility to enlighten subscribers with endless NDepend analysis results for various frameworks. I almost always skip those posts.
However, this latest post regarding the NHibernate 2.1 release I found most amusing.
I’ve been subjected to NHibernate. I don’t enjoy the experience. Some of the pain that I’ve felt begins to make sense. 58,000 lines of spaghetti code to do some pretty simple ORM mapping – woot! {snigger}
Well, I am a user (not sure if 'fan' is the right word), but I'm also a thinker, and interested in what, more specifically, you don't like about NHibernate?
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Hi Richard - that's a fair call, it is a bit lame of me to make an derrogatory comment without any justification. In some ways this post was aimed at those that I've been working with and who understand my reservations about NHibernate.
My main gripe with NHibernate is not that the tool itself is lacking, but rather that there seems to be such a huge fan base of supporters that are quick to tout its (IMO unjustified) superiority. Having said that - in my experience doing something very simple with NHibernate has been overly complex. I made some comments when I first started using it here. I also think that at 1.6Mb its severely bloated - I'd prefer to see seperate assmeblies, I can't imagine that I'm using more that 10% of that 1.6Mb. I also dislike the artifacts which presumably have occurred during the porting process - classes with Bean in the name have little meaning in .NET. I've had much better experiences with other ORM products, or even writing custom ORMs.
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This was very interesting to read. I cannot decide if I agree or disagree, but interesting nonetheless.
Thanks!
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