Ashutosh Nilkanth's Blog

The project I’m working on at work is gaining momentum, and we are nearly starting with the proof-of-concept architecture solution.

While I’ve used ORM‘s for data objects and domain persistence in the past, we have been playing with NHibernate at work for this project. NHibernate is a port of Hibernate Core for Java to the .NET Framework. It handles persisting plain .NET objects to and from an underlying relational database.

For the generation of business entity classes and the HBM mapping files for NHibernate-driven objects, we tried out a couple of tools. One such tool called the NHibernate Plugin caught my eye, because it includes a GUI modelling workspace to drag-and-drop database objects, and create relationships between them, and finally the plugin auto-generates the business entity classes and HBM XML files for you. Unfortunately the plugin is only available for Visual Studio 2005, and since our project utilizes .NET Framework 3.5 (with VS.NET 2008), we might not be able to make use of it anytime soon. Never the less, its a great tool worth mentioning, and if someone comes up with a workaround to make it work in VS.NET 2008 then please leave me a message. (Update: NConstruct Lite is a great wizard-like generator for NHibernate, and its free too!)

By the way, the other day at work, I received an email from Vishal Sharma, and as it turns out, we both work at the same company. Small world eh! Vishal covered the top Aussie webapps/startups, that also featured Feedity, sometime back. Vishal and I briefly talked about planning out a web venture of some sort in the coming months.

There’s a huge amount of data (raw and processed) on the Internet, which makes it a uber-database of sorts. What we always needed were tools we could use to fetch or mix this data, and create other useful streams of information. Technically, this mechanism combines data mining (scraping) and data modelling (mashups).

When Yahoo! launched its Pipes service a couple of months back, I was overwhelmed by its usefullness and usability. I remember saying that I expected something this clever from Google. And I guess Google realized that too. So when I heard about the new Google Mashup Editor (currently in private beta), I couldn’t wait to play around with it. Their website says, “Google Mashup Editor is an AJAX development framework and a set of tools that enable developers to quickly and easily create simple web applications and mashups with Google services like Google Maps and Google Base. Google Mashup Editor is a great tool for grabbing information from feeds and letting users see and manipulate it.”

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This tool allows to directly access the data from BAPIs and Tables in the SAP System. Checkout the article: Transferring data from SAP to .NET using ERPConnect

What if the next time you longed for a piece of software to help you do your job, you could simply create the software yourself, in a few easy steps? That’s the promise of some do-it-yourself online web application builder tools, like Coghead, Dabble DB, Zoho Creator, Caspio etc.

What is special about these tools is that the users require less technical skills because the process is all drag-and-drop and visual. And because its all web based, there’s never any software to worry about or hardware to install.

I recently received a beta invite to review Coghead, and I was largely impressed with the “DIY” factor. Coghead provides a web-based platform with complete drag-n-drop, mapping, workflow, and other development features to enable delivery of applications that require zero infrastructure setup costs on your side.

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While I was looking for some data replication stuff over at the MySQL web site, I noticed a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) comparison chart for the leading database servers. Here’s what the chart looks like for a single-server dual-CPU TCO spanned over 3 years:

MySQL seems to have the lowest TCO while Oracle has the highest among the lot.