This thread looks to be a little on the old side and therefore may no longer be relevant. Please see if there is a newer thread on the subject and ensure you're using the most recent build of any software if your question regards a particular product.
This thread has been locked and is no longer accepting new posts, if you have a question regarding this topic please email us at support@mindscape.co.nz
|
Hi, I'm looking at several ORMs at the moment for a new solution:
Currently I'm a bit stuck deciding between your product LightSpeed vs Microsofts Entity Framework (EF). Can you please highlight the advantages of LightSpeed over EF? plus LLBL Gen &/or Teleriks ORM if you have time.
Thanks, Jeremy
|
|
|
|
|
I can't comment on LLBLGen or Telerik OpenAccess because I'm not familiar with them, but I'd say the following are our key advantages over EF: * Ease of use. We feel LightSpeed is very simple to use because it doesn't burden you with all the extra configuration and mapping options of EF. * Support. If you find a bug in EF, chances are you'll have to wait until the next service pack to get it fixed. If you find a bug in LightSpeed, there's a good chance we can get it fixed in the next nightly build. Same for features -- if you reckon it would be really handy if the framework or designer did X, you don't have to wait for VS2012 for it to happen, you have a good chance of getting it the next day! We feel this is a really big advantage for our customers -- see e.g. these posts from David Hayden and Chris Cyvas (link to cached version as original seems to be down). * Smoother design-time experience. Database synchronisation is a massive convenience feature: EF has it, but we think ours is smoother. Plus we've now extended this into a migrations framework so you can manage and control your database schema versions very easily -- and portably across the different database back-ends. * Speed. EF3.5 suffered badly from performance issues. (Although Microsoft say that EF4 has made improvements in this area; we haven't measured ourselves against EF4 because it would be unfair to do so while EF4 is still in pre-release.) Hope this helps! |
|
|
|
|
As a follow on to what Ivan said, we have also published a rough comparison guide between a few different object relational mappers. You'll likely want to tinker yourself to form your own opinions as well as keep in mind that EF in the comparison is the 3.5 edition, not the unreleased 4 edition. http://www.mindscape.co.nz/products/lightspeed/comparison.aspx I hope that helps, John-Daniel Trask |
|
|
|
|
I would agree with pretty much what Ivan said regarding support and a smooth design-time experience. We switched from EF to Lightspeed because we needed both SQL Server and Amazon SimpleDB support... and we haven't looked back. We found the designer to be a bit more polished. With EF we were hand editing XML a ton to fit our needs. With Lightspeed, we were able to stay within the designer which helped ease the learning curve across our team. And when Ivan says "there's a good chance we can get it fixed in the next nightly build" he's not joking. Frankly it's disturbing how quickly these guys turned around some fairly significant changes in a day. |
|
|
|
|
Hi Ivan, JD and freshlogic, Getting this info including a customer testimony (in 24 hrs) and a comparison link (that I missed) will be great to take back to the tech's & executives on the board to justify this choice. Thanks for the info! Hope to get back to you shortly. Jeremy
|
|
|
|
|
Hi, I'm going to throw my my two cents in here too. I was evaluating all the same ORMs you are and I picked LightSpeed and am thrilled with it. The team here fixed a bug I found and added a feature I needed in a matter of days. That alone makes LightSpeed worth its weight in gold. Its like having the ORM developers on your team! The better designer, excellent database support, etc are icing on the cake. John
|
|
|
|
|
Here's my key selling points for choosing LightSpeed over any other ORM:
|
|
|
|
|
I dabbled with LS for an hour or so when I bought it but didn't have a need for it at the time. Recently I had to do my very own first website (i'm proficient in C# and have a strong interest in ASP.NET MVC but it ain't my job, so it was just a hobby), and i'd watched Tekpub's EF4 series, so naturally I used it. I've been impressed so far, other than the lack of migrations, but really don't have any real-world experience to compare it to. I'm looking forward to a comparison with EF4 now that it's a final product. |
|
|
|
|
(I can't edit my post?) It's also worth noting that because i'm locked into IIS hosts, support for anything other than MSSQL is nice but not really a selling point to me. |
|
|
|
|
Hi George, Appreciate your post. Generally everything we do with LightSpeed is targeted around helping developers become more productive with their time. The core engine helps that to a degree and the design time experience even more so. While we do have our comparison chart (which needs updating) the key benefits LightSpeed offers are:
Overall we feel that LightSpeed is a superior product and will continue to build on that lead. It may be that all of the benefits that LightSpeed offers don't appeal to you and therefore you should keep using the entity framework if it does what you need (or until it's killed... sorry, I couldn't resist ;-) We disabled editing because often we'd bang out a response faster than the person would edit the post. Super fast support responses from the dev team probably also counts towards why using LightSpeed might be a better choice as well. I hope that helps, John-Daniel |
|
|
|
|
LS is all that and more John Daniel! I'm really happy with my purchase, and am starting to use it on larger projects. George mentioned he was locked into IIS hosting with MSSQL, for me a key benefit is that LS works on Mono; so its not only database neutral but platform neutral as well! Cheers, |
|
|
|
|
Telerik seems to be sun setting Data Access / Open Access so it is probably a poor choice😒 |
|
|
|
