A blogger declared almost a year ago the object-relational mapping (ORM) is "the Vietnam of computer science". Debate surrounding this declaration is as contentious as debate about Vietnam. Bottom line: Was he right?

If you've been doing software development over the past five years, using an object-oriented language (Java, C++) and a relational database, you know that one of the biggest developments in software development has been object-relational mapping, also known as "ORM". The goal of ORM is to enable systems designed according to an object paradigm to store their data in a relational database (the most common form of database management system these days) in a structured formulaic fashion. Seems simple and obvious.

But what seems obvious and simple rarely is either one, and ORM has led to frequent conniptions and convulsions among developers simply trying to find a consistent way to store and retrieve data. Frameworks like Hibernate arose that sometimes injected more problems into the mix than they solved, and Java's JPA (Java Persistence API) follows in Hibernate's footsteps.

Last year, Ted Neward, consultant and author of numerous books on software development including Effective Enterprise Java, posted to his blog that ORM qualifies as the Vietnam of Computer Science.

Pretty extreme analogy... for something that perhaps deserves a pretty extreme analogy?

Read Ted's blog to see if you agree...