On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 8:33 AM, Ashley Aitken <mrhat...@mac.com> wrote: > Finally, I am also not sure how something like ActiveRecord approach would > actually work, or be compatible with, Cayenne. To my mind it defeats > the whole purpose of having a container managing the persistence of a > collection of objects, not that AR is not an interesting / useful approach > on its own.
Having used to actively develop Cayenne applications, but more recently having to develop using JPA, which uses an AR approach, I can say that it doesn't actually work or help to mix AR and Unit-of-work Cayenne DataContext concepts. You end up trying to imitate a scratchpad area using a database transaction, which leaves an ongoing open database connection for each DataContext. JPA entities don't have any easy way to be worked on as a group short of an active database transaction. > I haven't had anywhere near the experience with large applications / systems > as I am sure many of you have had but I thought the very point of > OO was to encapsulate data and behaviour. As well, the primary purpose of > MVC was to cleanly separate the presentation, application, and > domain objects/classes. Yes, I've had this argument used against the Cayenne way of doing things by coworkers. What Unit-of-work does is movie the level of OO from the individual objects being saved to an scratchpad area. It's far more practical to work with a scratchpad of interrelated objects than individual objects. Unfortunately, the AR methodology won out, and now we have all kinds of issues of not being able to roll back groups of changes. I suppose with some technologies, it would be possible to delegate the scratchpad commit and rollback operations to the individual objects (I've tried to do this with JPA) but it hasn't worked well in practice.
