I've worked with a few different ORMs in a few different languages -- There seems to be no agreement on what kind of thingy should be the source, and what should be generated.
Consider these thingies:
- Entity: A plain old object. It does stuff.
- Mapper: An object that creates an Entity from the DB, or persists it back.
- Table: A database table.
- Model: A separate model that describes an abstract thingy.
- Wiring: A description of how the parts of a Table and Entity are related.
That gives us these workflow styles:
- Model Driven: You write a Model, and the Entity, Mapper, and Table are generated.
- Entity Driven: You write a Class, and the Mapper and Table are generated.
- Table Driven: You make a Table, and the Entity and Mapper are generated.
- Wire-up: You write Class, Table, and Wiring, the Mapper is generated.
The Questions:
- Is there another style I've failed to notice?
- Which ORMs Support what styles?
- Is there a standard vocabulary for this? (I just made up the above.)