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The Competition
There are other products in the market that do roughly the same kind of work that Firestorm does. Here's a list of a few of them that points out advantages of FireStorm over these products wherever applicable:
MDAOG: DAO Generator
MDAOG is an open source DAO generator that generates DAO objects and their supporting classes to connect to JDBC databases. The MDAOG is designed to work mainly for the PostgreSQL database, but it can support database objects in Oracle database too.
MDAOG has a user interface where all the imported tables can be viewed. MDAOG integrates with the NetBeans IDE and provides a visual medium to generate the DAO code required for the application. Since the user interface is written in Swing, it can be run on any Java compatible platform.
MDAOG generates DAO code, the associated access classes, finder methods, and the data transfer objects. It also generates Java documentation based on the database documentation written for the tables in the database.
Since MDAOG is open source, it has leverage over FireStorm which is a paid tool. But MDAOG was designed mainly for the PostgreSQL database and has not been tested thoroughly for use with the Oracle Database. MDAOG expects support for sequences in the underlying code generation and hence cannot support the MySQL database. Another major drawback is it's lack of support for DAO generation for views in a database.
OrindaBuild
OrindaBuild is a utility designed to generate Java code to access tables, views, stored procedures, functions, and sequences in Oracle. OrindaBuild can also generate DAO and its supporting classes. The OrindaBuild is designed with the Oracle database in mind so its support for other databases is limited. The biggest advantage of OrindaBuild is its ability to work with Oracle stored procedures and generate Java classes to access and manipulate them. This reduces the complexity of writing Java code to access stored procedures and helps you to spend more time on the business logic implementation.
To support the DAO pattern, OrindaBuild creates a DAO Factory class and provides a single point of contact to all the other Java objects generated to support the database. The DAO Factory can be customized to support connection management, and application logging. Any Java-based logging API can be used in conjunction with the DAO factory.
OrindaBuild has an intuitive user interface that allows you to select the different tables, views, sequences, and stored procedures required by the application. The tool then creates data access objects and the associated DAO classes for the selected objects. OrindaBuild automatically reads the data dictionary of Oracle and generates different finder methods and persistence methods for the selected tables. It also creates similar methods for all the other selected sequences and stored procedures.
OrindaBuild's greatest advantage is its support for Oracle stored procedures and its biggest disadvantage is its exclusive focus on the Oracle database. Newer versions of Firestorm have added stored procedure support for Oracle and other databases.
Apart from these, there are many more small products like DAO4J and Somusar code generator that generate DAO code. Most of them are standalone implementations that do not have the extensive support and documentation that Firestorm boasts. These smaller products also may not have been tested in production environments as extensively as Firestorm. More information about these products can be found in the references section below.
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