Part of being on our technical team is looking for more efficient processes that we can employ. Lately, we’ve been looking very closely at ways to stop “rehashing”
the same code over and over. We’ve
noticed areas where code tends to be very similar across many websites. Why re-write it for each one?
We’re looking into two types of tools to aid in this
process: ORM and dynamic code generation.
Object Relational Mapping (ORM) allows us to generate the
basic code needed to store and retrieve objects from a database
without having to physically write a line of code. There are many more pluses
to these set of tools, but this would lead to much more efficiency for our
technical team. Some of the ones we’ll be learning more about are:
Our other option is simply pure dynamic code generation. I’ve
been researching T4 templates (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) and love the
possibilities! The idea is to create a template that represents a coding
structure you write often, then have the system use that template to generate a
code base for you. These templates are being used by many companies in order to
increase efficiency and productivity. In
fact, the ORM Subsonic listed above uses T4 templates when generating code to
represent a database.
You can learn more about Microsoft’s MSDN page for T4
templates here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb126445.aspx.
As always, we’ll keep you updated as we continue to work on
more efficient, repeatable processes for our projects.
