I saw a comment recently that said of DataMgr "His project does a lot more than what i need, otherwise I would use it myself. ". This was in the context of suggesting someone look at DataMgr, so I certainly don't want to seem ungrateful. Even so, this got me thinking.

I have certainly seen programs that do so much that the extra stuff gets in the way of doing the easy stuff. I don't think that is the case with DataMgr, however.

The download for the current version of DataMgr (2.2.0.2) is a 71KB zipped file (under 400KB unzipped) - hardly massive.

So, how hard is it to use? I have a database on my local computer named "TestSQL" that has a table named "widgets". Fields in this table include "color" and "size".

Here is actual code to save a widget to the widgets table:

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Ben Nadel recently posted a blog entry about moving queries to service layers (something I am a big fan of). Both the blog entry and the comments that followed were great and well worth the read. I especially liked Hal Helm's comment about differentiating between queries that are necessarily the same and those that are accidentally the same.

One thing that came up in this discussion was how to name the methods that retrieve data. One example was "getArticlesByAuthorID()" (I'm just picking one of many that followed this pattern). To me, this is a code smell. The method name describes not only what you want, but how you are going to get it.

I would do it differently.

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Hopefully some dear readers can help me out with my current quandary.

I have several components that I use on nearly every site that I develop. By using them, I save untold hours of programming and therefore provide cheaper results for my clients. At the same time, I am using solutions that have been tried and proven rather than developing from scratch every time.

There is, of course, a catch to all of this.

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I just fixed a couple of bugs in DataMgr which caused an update in both DataMgr and in the com.sebtools pack. The com.sebtools package also includes an update to FileMgr among other components.

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