ORM Designer is a great tool

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/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Problems with Showtime Anytime via Charter

Image
Showtime Anytime vs HBO Go I am a recent Charter cable TV subscriber (although I have been a Charter internet subscriber for over a decade). I subscribe to HBO and Cinemax, which gives me the HBO Go and Max Go on-demand options, both which work flawlessly for me. I also subscribe to Showtime, which gives me the Showtime Anytime on-demand option. This has been nothing but a headache so far. Unlike the two Go apps, Showtime Anytime requires that you register before your Charter login will give you access to their premium content. This in and of itself is annoying, but what makes it far worse is that in all the places where they tell you about this registration requirement, they provide no hyperlink to aid you in figuring out where/what exactly they are asking for, and so far, I have never been able to login. The login process, in short (detailed screenshots below), involves two different Showtime web sites (sho.com and showtimeanytime.com) which seem to be very loosely int...
Read more

Charter could be worse

Image
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 sp...
Read more

Introducing simpleFM, PHP edition

On Friday the 13th of April, I did a presentation of a complex FileMaker and Flash integration project I built. From previous experience presenting multi-technology integration projects to developers, I have come to realize that what people want is less of the Power Point, less of the gee-whiz demo files, and more of the practical cook book material. So on Thursday before the presentation, I put together a very simple Flash demo which contains all of the details on how to make Flash interact bi-directionally with FMSA, and not much else. The process got me thinking; it is so simple to understand the well documented FMSA CWP API and build command urls, and it is so simple to use the built-in XML() class in ActionScript 2 to slice and dice the xml FMSA returns, why are all the connectors which exist for interacting with FMSA so relatively complex? I have experience with FX.php , FMandPHP , and FileMakerPHP . For dot net integration with FMSA, there is Wim Decorte's FMdotNET . I a...
Read more