I just remembered some background BTW. The conclusion I came to in the
message below is the same one we made in 2001 when we approached the
initial Cayenne design. The group of people involved all did
WebObjects development on Windows, and used CVS (which is rather
directory-unfriendly). So the feeling was that having mapping in a
single file is a usability feature compared to EOF. Since we are not
going to split map.xml any further, look at it this way: it makes
sense to have an .emodeld folder for EOF as it had one mapping file
per entity... it does not for Cayenne.
Andrus
On Dec 19, 2007, at 6:27 PM, Andrus Adamchik wrote:
> Not saying yes or no just yet, but let me comment on the specific
> items.
>
>> * Have Cayenne Modeler save the XML files (cayenne.xml, etc) into a
>> Cayenne wrapper directory of your naming, such as MyModel.cayenne (it
>> would append the .cayenne, which is the wrapper signature). You
>> could
>> also have MyOtherModel.cayenne in the same directory.
>
> Currently you can have multiple cayenne.xml files either in
> different packages or in the root of different jars (of course this
> will only becomes really useful once we implement CAY-943). Having
> multiple cayenne.xml in a single jar doesn't buy you much really...
>
>> * Have Cayenne resolve all *.cayenne wrappers at the root of the
>> CLASSPATH upon startup.
>
> How are you planning to do that? The only environment independent
> way that I know of in Java is "ClassLoader.getResources(String)"
> which requires an exact name, not a pattern. This would work for
> multiple cayenne.xml in the root of different jars, but won't work
> for "*.cayenne" (there are some workarounds that may potentially
> limit portability).
>
>> * The *.cayenne wrapper directories could be "branded" with a Cayenne
>> logo (at least on OS X, not 100% sure about other OS's).
>
> This would be an OSX only feature.
>
>> * The *.cayenne wrapper can be double-clicked to launch Cayenne
>> Modeler (again, on OS X, hopefully on other OS's too).
>
> This one too.
>
>> * It is easier to copy a model around in a GUI (drag and drop one
>> "file") instead of select multiple files.
>
> True, although usually you'd have .svn in your folder, so you do not
> want to copy that.
>
>> I can't think of any real negatives to this, either,
>> but feedback is greatly appreciated.
>
> The biggest negative to me is that we introduce extra complexity
> without a clear advantage. I am worried of Cayenne turning into Perl
> with multiple redundant ways to solve any given problem (note that
> usually I am the one guilty of this .... for instance now we have 3
> types of persistent objects).
>
> Anyways, we have to weigh potential benefits against this concern.
> And the only benefit I am seeing so far is branding on OS X which is
> probably the least of our concerns.
>
> Andrus
>
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