Object Relational mapping library for Adobe AIR

As you might know Adobe AIR has build in support for SQLite databases. This means that as a front-end developer you now have to write SQL statements again. When I write back-end code using Java or .NET I always try to avoid writing boiler code. And I am not the only one. Projects like Hibernate for Java, NHibernate for .NET and ActiveRecord (from the guys at Castle) are ORM implementations.

Last week I came across FlexORM an Object Relational mapping library for AIR projects developed with Flex. I was already using a slightly modified version of the EntityManager class that was written by Christophe Coenraets for the AIR projects that I have done. But FlexORM looks very promising.

Take a look at some of the features:

• Non-intrusive (no need to extend from a base class)
• Save, Update, Delete, Load Item, and Find All operations
• Automatically creates database schema
• Many-to-one associations
• One-to-many associations
• Many-to-many associations (the framework automatically creates and maintains the association table)
• Bidirectional one-to-many associations
• Cascade saves/updates/deletes
• Transient (non-persistent) properties
• Ability to configure table and column names
• Inheritance mapping
• FK constraints (using triggers since SQLite does not implement foreign key semantics)

I will definitely try this out on my next project. The project is hosted on RIAForge.