ColdFusion ORM - An Evolution in building datacentric application

As we all know, ColdFusion was born as DBML - a script that was very similar to HTML but had certain tags that could perform database operation and it revolutionized the way web applications were built. Tags like cfquery, cfinsert, cfupdate made it very easy to perform database operations while building web application. Even after 14 years of CFML, (which we incidently completed day before yesterday), cfquery is *the* most popular and the most commonly used tag. However there are few downsides to it

• Database vendor dependency - The queries that are written are DB specific. If you ever need to switch the database or if you need to make the application database agnostic, it becomes too much of pain. You will end up changing the entire application code or lot of conditional code to handle queries for different databases.
• Very tight coupling with the database - The queries have very tight coupling with the database. This means that if there is any change in the table name or column name, you will end up with changes all over your application code.
• Repititive and hence low on productivity - For any CRUD (Create, read, update and delete) operation, you need to write queries which are more or less same for all the tables. You must have felt that you are repeating the same code everywhere in the application. There is too much of repititiveness which reduces productivity.
• Error prone - How many times did you write insert/update queries and then you had to struggle to debug because the order of column and its values were different? And how many times did you get frustrated because there was a datatype mismatch between the value you had specified and the one expected? How many times did you write a query that was prone to sql injection and you were reminded to use query param? I am sure all of this has happened to all of us and its completely natural given the way queries are written. They are error prone.

ColdFusion 9 introduces a new way to build datacentric application using ORM, that handles all the downsides we saw above. It is not a replacement to cfquery/cfinsert/cfupdate tags but its a different approach altogether. It allows you to build your application using objects where you focus on the business logic and all the grunt work of persistence is taken care automatically (In simple words you dont write SQL queries generally).

ORM (Object relational mapping) is a well known strategy/technique to map relational data to the object model. In an object model, business objects are not aware of the database structure. Objects have properties and references to other objects whereas Databases consist of tables with columns that are related to other tables using foreign key. ORM provides a bridge between the relational database and the object model allowing you to access and update data entirely using the object model of an application.

ORM is not new to ColdFusion either - Transfer and Reactor being the most popular ones. ColdFusion ORM (or CF-ORM) is much more extensive and sophisticated ORM solution than these ORMs. ColdFusion ORM is built on top of Hibernate - the best java ORM engine out there, which is quite powerful and extensive. ColdFusion ORM makes it very easy to use persistence with objects and at the same time allows you to leverage the full power of Hibernate.

ColdFusion ORM provides features such as

• Defining the persistence mapping and managing the object's persistence using very simple methods.
• Database vendor independence
• Loose coupling between database and application - The application becomes very adaptive to changes as the configuration is central and changes will be required only there.
• Auto-generation of schema - ORM lets you auto-generate the schema for your application. So you never need to bother about keeping your object model and the database schema in sync. It can automatically happen.
• Productivity and manageability - Since ORM takes care of all persistence grunt work, you focus on your application logic and thus your application becomes much more cleaner and manageable. It also makes you lot more productive as application can be built much more faster.
• Concurrency - ORM inherently takes care of concurrency control. So you dont need to worry much about how things would work when multiple database operations happen in parallel web requests.
• Performance - ORM provides lot of performance optimizations that can make your application run faster. The optimizations include two levels of caching (including pluggable distributed cache), lazy loading, various settings to tune the sql queries generated by ORM.
• Secure - Since queries will be executed by ORM, issues like SQL injection no longer exist and thus your application becomes secure.
• Inbuilt pagination
• SQL like query (HQL) for a finer control of the data to be loaded.
• ...

In this series of posts, I will be talking lot more about ORM which I hope you would like. In case you have not downloaded ColdFusion 9 beta, go download it and start playing with it.