Olymars

Lots of negative talk regarding OlyMars lately. I will admit that I don't have the time to figure out how to use it (gave it a try a few times, but just wasn't my style). However, it is still a very cool tool, it just has a crappy interface on top of it, but it isn't meant to be production code anyway now is it? My understanding is that it is just a research project...and when is the last time you saw a research project with warm fuzzy documentation and a sexy UI?

[Jesse Ezell]

It's not just the interface.  The templates have a very steep learning curve as well.  IMO, the ASP style syntax is absolutely perfect for template based code generation.  That's why CodeSmith has nearly identical syntax as ASP.NET.  Not only is it the perfect syntax, but everyone already knows it!  Anyone using Olymars, please give CodeSmith a try!

5 Comments

  • > Anyone using Olymars, please give CodeSmith a try!





    So, I suppose that your repeated comments against OlyMars are honest, unbiased and fair?





    How to loose credibility, Lesson #1.





    /CL


  • Actually, I believe they are fair. I don't stand to gain a whole lot having you use CodeSmith. I built CodeSmith so that I could stop writing so much repetative code. I decided to give it to the community so that others could stop writing repetative code as well. CodeSmith is FREE. My opinions about Olymars, are just that, opinions.

  • I have tried Codesmith (version 2.5) and although it did present a nice way of designing the templates, it was not nearly as easy to use as Olymars. Maybe it's because I am an experienced software developer that uses code gens to design very intuitive DAL and Business Facades, but I think that a developer should be able to plugin his own functionality when using code gens. A prime example of how to do this lay in the architecutre of Olymars. You don't need the source code, they give you the object model, and then provide you a way to extend the product using your own tools.



    The bottom line is that if you are using a code gen, it has to be fully customizable, not very customizable. If you want a tool that uses it's OR mapper to integrate DAL with your Business Layers, then Olymars is the way to go. Its not pretty, but due to its plugin/addin architecture, it blows everything else out of the water. If you spend a few hours understanding how it works, then you will be able to design most of your DAL and DAL based Business components in less than 5 minutes.

  • CodeSmith is 100% extensible as well, it gives you the full power of the .NET runtime in your templates, and the template syntax is much easier to work with IMHO.

  • Hello Dear,

    I am just working with a web project built using ASP.NET and SQL Server, I want to generate my sprocs and my biz objects I tried, CSLA.NET provided at Expert One-o-One Visual Basic.NET Business Objects , but I found it more suitable for Windows Application, and in environment has Remoting , but I need just to generate my objects and have rich relationships between the biz objects , I want to use a rich generator I used CodeSmith , but I am about to try OlyMars , anybody can help please ? , I need a fast and rich relational tool to generate my biz objects ?

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