Re: Mapping SQL Result Sets to Browsers

Maurice O'Prey wrote:

There is no degradation in performance when using business objects (used
correctly), in-fact there is an improvement in performance in my experience!

You still haven't told us what you consider a business object. I was using the term specifically in conjunction with the concept of an ORM like Spring, in which the database access is delegated to a framework. If you hand-write each business object class, then you can avoid all those pitfalls, but it's not easy and while programmer productivity is *nicreased* for *consumers* of the objects, productivity is *decreased* for the poor guys who have to hand-write all those classes.

What language do you use? How do you handle foreign key instantiation? How do you specify that a calculation is done once when the object is retrieved as opposed to every time the getter method is invoked? Do you cache instances? Do you make dirty instances visible between sessions? Do you perform notifications when database changes occur?

The blanket statement that "there is no degradation in performance" has no meaning until you begin to address those questions. I am not saying that you can't design a good business object framework. I'm just saying that you *can* design one that performs poorly, and that there are things to look out for.

Joe