Today was quite an exciting day for us attendees of Scotch on the Rocks (SotR). One of the key parts of today’s sessions was Object Relational Mapping (ORM) in ColdFusion 9. If you are unfamiliar with what ORM really is (like I was, not so long ago), read about the basic principles on WikiPedia.

Now, to be completely honest, I was quite sceptical about this whole principle. We have experienced a couple of situations where our development server was very slow and saving time by giving ColdFusion more work to do didn’t really sounded like a great option.

After Adam’s last session giving more and more in-depth information about how ORM in CF9 works I got convinced that this technique is quite powerful. The argument that it gives CF more to do and on the long run, only slows the server down is somewhat tackled by the fact that CF9 introduces some advanced caching techniques, caching stuff from sessions, to query results, to specific parts of code. If carefully used this is said to make requests quite a bit faster – I’m not talking two or three times, but ten, twenty, thirty times, ofcourse depending on how you use it.

A valuable lesson we all learn at some point in our lives, if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Thruth is, that’s the only argument I’ve got left against usage of ORM. But as a developer, I love the OOP-nature of the whole idea. Let’s hope this feature is as great and wonderful as I’m affraid to believe it is!

To learn more about ORM in CF9, check this.