ECO - Heavy Lifting Support

I have developed in Borland Delphi since the 16 bit version 1 and shipped apps for Windows 3.1. In early 2001 I was working for a forward thinking UK based digital TV/media-on-demand company. Our primary product was highly scalable, highly distributed, bleeding edge performance media server. Sadly, the technology was lost as the company was a tech startup and funding dried up...the world was not ready for video over DSL then. If only, eh?

Anyway, these guys were code generating most of their code from UML (Rational Rose at the time) into C++ and building for Solaris and Linux. The closest I got to this was to write a build tool that QA could use to kick off the main product's build on Linux along with the Windows apps' build...the only bit of Kylix programming I ever did. (Never met anyone else who did much more either!)

I was responsible for the design and development of our Windows based management applications and, inspired by the code generation techniques used by the rest of the gang, was implementing an ORM to speed up the development of the end-user apps. Nobody used the term "ORM" in those days (at least, as I remember). It was MDA back then, before the OMG trademarked the term (yep, we all had to adopt a new vocabulary because of that!!).

It was then I discovered Bold for Delphi - a fully featured object-to-relational framework, with all the trimmings: integration into Rational Rose. object versioning, caching and concurrency support to name but a few features. Man, this was 2001, for god's sake...where did you find features like that in the Window's world?

Very soon after, the company I was working for went down due to funding being withdrawn and I have left Delphi behind for Dotnet. After five years in the Microsoft arena, I am shopping for an ORM to support a new app dev for a new client. Guess what...

Bold are still going, the company is now called Capable Objects and the product is called ECO. It's still true to its original roots, is still supremely capable (just like they say on the tin!) and has been released for Visual Studio!

I've been looking around for something to help in a new project for a potential mass market application, that will be deployed on client's machines. This is one of my tools of choice for the new endevour.

If you haven't had a look, check out the fully functional version from here.