CSLA Has Competition!

CSLA Has Competition!

Old forum URL: forums.lhotka.net/forums/t/6331.aspx


fgrove posted on Wednesday, February 04, 2009

I saw an advertisement for a product called "Entity Spaces" while I was browsing around and decided to look at it closer. It may not match the exact capabilities of CSLA, but the core capability one would expect from a business layer is present [e.g. business objects and object <=> database persistence]. I'm not interested in moving away from CSLA as of this moment, but I was wondering if anyone here has had experience with this framework or other available frameworks and how they compare to CSLA. I tried a quick Google search and didn't get any promising hits regarding review or comparison of .NET business layers.

I'm no historian but in thinking of the history behind CSLA and business layers in general, the first I learned of them was in 2005 with "Expert C# Business Objects". Now we're in 2009 and it seems to me that robust business layers like CSLA are still in their infancy [in the .NET realm at least], especially in terms of the commercial offerings. Does anyone have thoughts as to the potential of the market in this area[not speaking strictly to .NET] and also the longevity of this technology? Where might you predict applications, developers, and technologies go from here?

http://www.entityspaces.net/Portal/Default.aspx

skagen00 replied on Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Every once in a while one of these posts come up - EntitySpaces isn't the only "competitor" - there are ones such as DeKlarit, IdeaBlade, Strataframe....

Many of us like that CSLA doesn't tie itself to a particular data-access technology and is agnostic in this respect. In fact, this is intentional for Rocky to do so. 

Also, CSLA is free. The others aren't.

Also, the community is very worthwhile. I've checked out messageboards on these other platforms and they are dead-as-a-doornail. Granted, you have someone you can call up, but I feel better here.

Finally, you learn fundamentals and the framework through the book and have the source code. Many of the others don't give you the source code, or it's extra, and there certainly isn't a book to guide you through it.

Are the others a more turn-key? I certainly think so. But the extra control one gets in having the source code, understanding the source code, being free in your data-access technology, and having this community is simply not anything that I've come across can match. Oh, and did I mention it's free?

Obviously if Rocky decides to retire in Barbados (etc.) tomorrow it would be tough for the product to continue to mature, and that is a slightly larger risk than a commercial product in my opinion, but I've got the source and understand it and can take it from there.

Chris

dlambert replied on Wednesday, February 04, 2009

I'm not an expert in EntitySpaces, so take the following with a grain of salt, but I saw something along the lines of "generate classes from your DB" on their home page, and it seems like this approach might run into problems as scenarios get complex.  The sample code they show seems consistent with this.

One of the things that CSLA gives us is the ability to deliberately create mappings of DB objects to business objects to account for the fact that we sometimes need business objects to aggregate, compose, decompose, and otherwise bend, fold, spindle and mutilate DB objects in order to truly turn them into business objects.  This is the whole "behavior-driven objects" idea, right?

If you're generating DB objects directly from the DB, this is tricky, isn't it?

Personally, I've become enamored of using a layer like SubSonic (which provides an API pretty similar to that shown in the sample code) in my DAL to simplify data access without giving up the control I've got in a real business object.

Of course, it's entirely possible that I'm missing something important here....

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