ORM Designer is a great tool

posted by Jeremiah Wednesday, March 07, 2012

The claim from the ORM Designer website:
With ORM Designer you develop, design and document all at once. You don't need other tools to design application model.
My experience:
It does exactly what they claim it does.
When I found ORM Designer I was just shopping for a better alternative to Gliffy, as the complexity of project I'm working on has outgrown a plain drawing tool. I was looking at alternatives like PowerDesigner and other ERD/schema management tools, and it occurred to me to search for tools with native support for ORM, as the project in question is using Doctrine2.

So I found ORM Designer, and they claimed to be Mac compatible, but it turns out they pulled a bit of a fast one on that front, as the compatibility amounts to showing step by step instructions for running it with Wine. As it turns out, I've subsequently spoken to the developer, and he mentioned that version 2, which is due imminently, will have real multiplatform support.

In any case, it works fine for me on Wine, and of course if you're running Fusion or Parallels on your Mac, or if you're running Windows, it's no issue anyway.

So going into the trial, I fully expected to run into some situations where the tool would not allow us to define something, and we'd have to break off the ORM Designer to code workflow at some point, and begin maintaining it manually.

For example, the question of creating indexes on multiple fields to enforce uniqueness was a situation where we assumed we may have to hand tweak. Nope. Works perfect inside ORM Designer, as long as you alias how the association is inversed.

Another example, I initially missed that I could define a namespace for the module, so I thought I'd have to add that in manually. Nope. Works perfect inside ORM Designer.

One bummer with version 1 is that it only exports as XML or YML, but version 2 will add support for annotations, which is what we favor. Currently I'm exporting XML to a Docrtine cli sandbox and converting with Doctrine itself. This just adds one easy step to the process of updating Entities.

I'm super happy with this workflow, and really look forward to the next version.

Check it out for yourself: orm-designer.com/

0 comments links to this post

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

Charter could be worse

posted by Jeremiah Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Say what you like about Charter's borderline hostile customer service, price gouging, etc, but if there's one thing that can make a man overlook a few personality flaws, it's raw speed.

Yes, I hate Charter's secret $10/month punishment fee on broadband for non-cable-subscribers, but where we live (the foothill north of LA it's going to be a long time before we see fiber reaching us) there's been nothing that can come close to coaxial broadband, and Charter is the only game in town.

But as luck would have it, Charter is not content to be the hands down winner in the speed department. They recently started promoting significantly faster packages at lower prices to their existing customers (me).

Last month I upgraded to their "Max" offering (nominal 20Mbps Down/2Mbps Up) which turns out to be cheaper than what I was paying for the previous 10Mpbs offering, and double the nominal speed. Okay, well as we all know from the School of Hard Knocks, nominal speed is bullshit, and you're normally happy if you get close to it. Oh, really?

This afternoon I received my new DOCSIS 3.0 router from Newegg (a Moto Surfboard 6120). It sure makes the surcharge easier to swallow when you're getting 20% more than the nominal speed. Nice!




1 comments links to this post

1 Comments:

At 12:35 PM, Blogger Plato said...

Jeremiah-

I tweaked on your AddDollarFormat() for FMP over at briandunning.com - wasn't sure if I should upload it as a new function or send it to you. Here it is.

-Eric Ridgley


formatNumber() FileMaker Pro Function

//theNumber can be any num
//prefix can be any text string
//round_to can be any integer
Let ( [
round_to = Int(round_to);
Amount = Round ( Abs ( theNumber ) ; round_to ) ;
A = Int ( Amount ) ;
L = Length ( A ) ;
R = If ( Amount ≠ A ; Left ( amount - A & "000000000" ; round_to + 1 ) ; Left(".000000000";round_to+1 ))
] ;
Case ( theNumber < 0 ; "-" ) &
prefix &
Case (
L=15 ; Left(A;3) &","& Middle(A;4;3) &","& Middle(A;7;3) &","& Middle(A;10;3) &","& Right(A;3) ;
L=14 ; Left(A;2) &","& Middle(A;3;3) &","& Middle(A;6;3) &","& Middle(A;9;3) &","&Right(A;3) ;
L=13 ; Left(A;1) &","& Middle(A;2;3) &","& Middle(A;5;3) &","& Middle(A;8;3) &","&Right(A;3) ;
L=12 ; Left(A;3) &","& Middle(A;4;3) &","& Middle(A;7;3) &","& Right(A;3) ;
L=11 ; Left(A;2) &","& Middle(A;3;3) &","& Middle(A;6;3) &","& Right(A;3) ;
L=10 ; Left(A;1) &","& Middle(A;2;3) &","& Middle(A;5;3) &","& Right(A;3) ;
L=9 ; Left(A;3) &","& Middle(A;4;3) &","& Right(A;3) ;
L=8 ; Left(A;2) &","& Middle(A;3;3) &","& Right(A;3) ;
L=7 ; Left(A;1) &","& Middle(A;2;3) &","& Right(A;3) ;
L=6 ; Left(A;3) &","& Right(A;3) ;
L=5 ; Left(A;2) &","& Right(A;3) ;
L=4 ; Left(A;1) &","& Right(A;3) ;
A
) //end Case
& If(round_to=0;"";R)
) //end Let

//http://www.briandunning.com/cf/196
//modifid by Eric Ridgley, 11JAN2010

 

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

Lord, please deliver me from Entourage

posted by Jeremiah Tuesday, September 22, 2009

0 comments links to this post

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

Entourage: The app we love to hate

posted by Jeremiah Thursday, April 09, 2009

Well, today is one of my perennial exercises in patience...

0 comments links to this post

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

Soliant Blogs

posted by Jeremiah Tuesday, March 24, 2009

In case it's not obvious from the deafening silence here, I've been getting my blog on elsewhere. Check out the public Soliant blog, where the best content from our internal Confluence site eventually makes its way. http://www.soliantconsulting.com/blog/

0 comments links to this post

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

Adobe Max 2008

posted by Jeremiah Tuesday, November 18, 2008

It's the end of day 2 at Adobe Max, and I have not failed to be impressed. Thermo is the big noise, as expected, and has been dubbed Flash Catalyst. CS4 is pre-configured to begin leveraging the incredible decoupled round-trip work flows between visual design tools and development tools that FC promises. I only wish it wasn't "mid 2009" before we could expect to see a production version. Still happy to have my preview copy in hand.

Also being promoted is the great new component explorer, now delivered as an AIR app. And AIR deployment with 1.5 is so much slicker. Check it out:

0 comments links to this post

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

Atomic Context at FMDiSC

posted by Jeremiah Friday, June 13, 2008

I presented my Atomic Context slides today in L.A. for the mother of all FileMaker developer groups, FMDiSC.

You can get the presentation as a PDF file (2MB), PowerPoint slide show (2MB), or QuickTime Movie with narration (appx 30 minutes and 140MB).

(I made the video a downloadable MOV file, rather than a Google Video or YouTube video, because it needs high resolution to be able to read the slides.)

0 comments links to this post

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link