Data Modeling with Alzabo

Alzabo provides a relatively simple way to wrap objects around your relational database tables. There is a lot of good news here: the data-modeling tool is quite sophisticated, there is a large amount of nice functionality, the methods largely make sense, and the documentation is vast and generally well written. As the Open Source community has long said, using an existing, battle-tested and open tool is almost always better than rolling a new, proprietary package that solves the same problem.

But wrapping relational database tables inside of objects is always fraught with danger and problems, and Alzabo is no exception: joins are still clunky, and it's not clear how to create some queries. Alzabo isn't at fault here; it's an inherent problem when working with two technologies that see the world in different ways.

It's certainly clear that I'll be using Alzabo in the future for some of my server-side programs, particularly those that need more sophisticated caching and exception-handling than I could otherwise provide.

Next month, customs permitting, we will return to our tour of server-side Java, comparing Enhydra's DODS package with Alzabo and its kin.

Resources