[eluser]Nick_MyShuitings[/eluser]
[quote author="WanWizard" date="1305028798"]Whenever you use libraries to introduce some 'magic' to your application, you have to consider the pro's and con's for your particular situation.
If you're writing for yourself and the application needs raw speed because it's going to run on a low-budget Godaddy shared host, you'll make other decisions than when you're writing a large business application with a development team.
At my hourly rate, a days work roughly equals the cost of a dedicated quad-xeon server for a year. So if I introduce tools that greatly reduces the coding time, and makes maintenance easier, I have a business case.[/quote]
Exactly...
Its just a heads up (ie: word to the wise is a colloquialism for that), cuz lots of small developers I know personally, working on private pages, add in ORM's thinking it will save their lives, and then ask me why their app now benchmarks slower and is consuming the double of memory and sql calls. (I am PM at a 50 dev shop down in Argentina, and most of the guys do freelance) Just something to consider that not many pro-ORM devs usually bring up.
Can it save you time and frustration in development? oh completely. Is it often easier to bring a new person on? hell yeah. But do you inevitably take a performance hit that often increases nonlinearly as you scale the app (you have to start thinking about dehydrating the results, auto-loading only the first 1000 records etc etc etc).
I just pipe in cuz some new devs (and the forum has been filled to the brim with them lately), think of ORM and Active Record, like they are some magic box of unicorns and butterflies... without recognizing that you are just trusting a class and various functions to write and run your SQL for you.
Its a valid item to bring up, and I just choose to play devil's advocate on it. That said, DataMapper ORM is awesome code to study!, and I've used it on a few small projects just to test it out. Its what I would recommend if you've actually thought through the pros/cons of ORM usage with CI.
