I've long been against the idea of SQL in *SP pages for anything beyond a one person hackup. This view was coloured by the fact I've always worked in the programming environment and not the database environment. To me a database is merely something that persists my data.
At the same time, I believe an OO interface to be far nicer than SQL, so I try to hide my SQL behind standard 'Store' 'Table' objects. This makes me far more productive and my code more readable, but makes optimising the database interaction a real pain. [Another thing this approach does is tend to make the Java OO layer the data-store and not the database. While this is exactly what I want,n it's not usually what a legacy place will want. They need the database to be the data-storage.] I've recently been working with database programmers a lot. They have a data-centric, like to do SQL, form of programming and so being able to something like DB Tags would appeal to them. In fact I'm surprised they didn't choose it. Taking that view, I could almost imagine JSP's being seen as stored-procedures and then having a library of HTML-ing methods. Similar to ECS. In fact, that would be a very interesting design to try, and one I would seriously consider suggesting to DB programmers. JSP, DBTags, ECS. Just as an experiment mind you. Anyway, I think my summary is that something like DBTags does seem a very bad choice from an OO/MVC viewpoint. But a DB viewpoint will probably like them, and I'm sure it makes a lot of sense to companies porting old websites across. Plus, a lot of companies are perfectly happy to say "We will not change from an SQL database to an OO database etc". Hell, enough are happy to say "We're sticking with Oracle", which seems less sensible. Just some thoughts.. Bay On 28 Sep 2001, Geoff Lane wrote: > Slightly off topic - but I've noticed A LOT of the traffic on this list > is about the DB Tag related stuff. Am I the only one who thinks that the > whole idea of DB tags (for anything other than a very trivial site) is > really a Bad Idea? > > It just seems to me that the domain of storage and retrieval lies way > outside the domain of display. I'm willing to hear opinions on why > people use these - but they totally break MVC (which not everyone cares > about I admit). >
