Hi Frans,

Per (what appears to be) your post in 2009, it suggests the demise of all ORMs (for .NET) except EF and NHibernate (assume this means the demise of the LLblgen ORM also).

Since this is two years ago, could you give me your thoughts on this now?

Thanks!

(from) http://ayende.com/blog/4122/benchmarks-are-useless-yes-again

08/17/2009 07:07 PM by Frans Bouma

"I understand this depreciates the brands, but on the other hand, this allows new ones to grow up faster => more intensive competition."

You're on the market since 2003? or somewhat around that. Since that day, you've gained some marketshare but eventually lost it.

If I may, you mainly lost it due to the lack of progression in your own library (the 3.x branch) in favor of some super-duper framework you've been working on for a long time (v4).

You won't get it back. Not by a long shot. Let me explain: in the past 5-6 years, numerous frameworks have seen the light and have died off, just a few remained. That's logical market progression: several big players (2-3) fight for the top spot, the rest has marginal market share (<10%). Before MS released their frameworks, it was open, but you left more or less the market. MS released their frameworks, and no matter what you think of it, in the end there only will be the following frameworks: •Entity framework

•Some open source offering which does things differently. Best cards are in the hands of nhibernate, but their linq provider has to be better.

The rest will die or will have marginal market share. The simple reason for this is that the EF has millions of funding and a very large team of developers, and in the end they will get their act together and fix all the problems in the framework. It's not a competition really, they're included in .NET, you don't have to buy a framework from a 3rd party. If you don't agree with how the EF works, you can use an oss offering, also free, e.g. nhibernate. NHibernate will too in the end implement every single feature there is to implement, simply because all other problems are already solved.

that's also why we didn't decide to compete on framework features, but on the designer level. MS will never catch up at that level and we already have a big advantage in that area.

So where does that leave you? You might have a big framework with lots of features, and perhaps on paper you look better than whatever is out there, but frankly, it doesn't really matter: the people will choose what everybody else is using, what the known brands are. Some small group will pick a small player, but that's it. And you see that happening already today.

I'm not saying this to make you feel bad, I'm not that kind of person, trust me. The reason I explain this to you is that you might, even a little, get a bit of insight in what is happening today in the O/R mapping/data-access market and how the situation is and where you made your serious mistake. No low-level marketing tactic with competitor brandname advertising, rigged benchmarks and other crap will help you with that, markets don't work that way.

Alex, believe in what you can do yourself, instead of basing your success on the downfall of others. The only way to succeed is to take your own destiny in your own hands. Making others look bad in some 'test'/battle/benchmark isn't helping you one bit: it won't get you the marketshare you need to survive against Redmond, as you compete on the framework level, which is a lost race.

greenstone wrote:

Hi Frans,

Per (what appears to be) your post in 2009, it suggests the demise of all ORMs (for .NET) except EF and NHibernate (assume this means the demise of the LLblgen ORM also).

Since this is two years ago, could you give me your thoughts on this now?

I indeed did expect all o/r mapper frameworks to be marginalized, but that didn't happen on that scale. EF has taken over, but we haven't seen a decline in sales, also because our designer supports EF now and EF still lacks a lot of stuff we offer (among them good support ).

If I compare discussions on the internet about how to do data-access from 2003-2006 with today, the world is totally different. Not many people even debate how to do data-access and if they do, it's not a long debate among all kinds of frameworks.

Within the .NET o/r mapper framework market, we do occupy a niche, but it's big enough for us to be a healthy company so we're not complaining . I think the niche exists because not everyone agrees with how EF / NH do things, and we do things a little differently. We know it doesn't appeal to everyone, but to enough people

I still do think that for a framework alone (so no designer) it's hard to compete with EF and NH in the end, simply because they will eventually get all the features you also have. That is, if they proceed adding new things and have a healthy team / focus. The past 1-2 years however the EF team has clearly shown not to have a clear focus about what they want to achieve, but merely follow what the loudest person in the audience cries for. (this is obvious when you read the emails on the data-access insiders email list, an internal MS email list). NH is moving slowly and with their move against fluentNH with the embedding of confORM, I don't know if it will get an uptake in the future or that it will move to the background more and more (at the expense of EF mostly).

Data-access/ORM is a weird world, today's hype is tomorrows nonsense. We've survived since 2003 and are still going strong It's true that at some point all features you might need / want are implemented, but we haven't reached that point yet, so more new stuff is planned for future versions of our framework, as well as the designer of course.