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ORM is wonderful and the idea is still very much alive but of course all those systems couldn't survive. Hibernate is the defacto standard now but is still a bit messy. ActiveRecord (Rails) is built on top of Hibernate and forms the foundation for Ruby On Rails in the PHP world. ActiveRecord (Castle) is the ASP.NET variant.

I use my own ORM system and I'd be completely lost without it.

Whilst it works very well, it's never quite as efficient as slamming through a data reader. But the convienience of working entirely in objects outside of load & save is worth the loss.

Rob.

To answer your question about Versant Open Access: : yes you are right; Versant Open Access has been Vanatec OpenAccess for 09/2005 -08/2008 before it became Telerik OpenAccess ORM. So it's more than live...

Also, an existing website does not necessarily mean that a product is live. Maybe you present a second list, with just the real LIVE ones.

I would say (being with OpenAccess for its lifetime) the list of players is now down to a maximum of 5, not counting L2S anymore.

Yes, indeed: Versant OpenAccess became Vanatec OpenAccess which became Telerik OpenAccess last year.
A mature product will have a history!

Tom

Entity spaces

http://www.entityspaces.net/Portal/Default.aspx

OpenAccess? Died as V., but renewed as T.

WilsonOrMapper, every much alive.

http://code.google.com/p/wilsonormapper/

ECO is actively maintained by CapableObjects (www.capableobjects.com). Eco4 is available for both VisualStudio and RadStudio. Eco5 will be VisualStudio only.

NPersist is now on CodePlex and looks live
http://www.codeplex.com/PuzzleNPersist

It is part of Puzzle Framework: http://www.puzzleframework.com/

I would hardly call NHibernate the "defacto standard." It certainly is in the ALT.NET community... but to say that in general it is not the standard across all .NET developers.

For some of us, SubSonic is the standard. Others would argue Linq2SQL/Entity Framework.

I suspect in most major corporations the standard is none... they probably roll their own Data Layer...

Jay Kimble

PS. I don't mean to pick a fight, but I really hate when folks do stuff like that... NHibernate is probably not at the majority level(too hard to use/learn/set up... although getting better)

Alachisoft recently made TierDeveloper free. Previously priced at around 1400$ i think this is a huge move since Tierdeveloper is a very mature product. Should check it out here.

Check this new orm called EntityORM: http://entityorm.uuuq.com

EntityORM is a fully typed Object Relational Mapping library for .NET 2.0.

The main strength of EntityORM is the ease of use. Most ORM libraries still require a lot of type casting and other plumbing to be written, EntityORM is designed to relieve the programmer from these tedious and error-prone tasks, making it very intuitive to use.

The main features are:

* DataBase independent
* Ease for build new drivers that are independent from the EntityORM core framework (for now there is Sql Server, Sql CE, MySql, Oracle, PostgreSQL and Access drivers)
* Automatic mark changed for changes entities (optional)
* Automatic lazy loading (optional)
* Automatic transactions (optional manual transaction for instance for two-phase commit)
* Ease to map for an existing database with minimal effort
* All relational types are supported (One-To-One, One-To-Many, Many-To-One, Many-To-Many)
* Flexible event framework
* Conditions para load filter data into entities
* Capability to map to different table names or field names
* Default values
* Rules validation
* Autonumber
* Guid
* Generic list to managed multiple entities hidden deleted entities
* Typed entities are lazy loading with caching reducing significantly the needed for reflection
* Entity views to faster load read-only data from one ore more tables into a single flat entity
* Join conditions to join several tables in to a sigle entity view
* Generic list to managed multiple entity views
* Distinct, automatic group and aggregate functions (count, sum, largest, average, smallest) supported in entity views