Introducing ORMDroid

Another year, another blog…

Actually, I’ve been out of the blogging cycle for a year or two now, as I’ve just been too busy with work to really dedicate any time to open source and my own projects, but a recent (positive!) change in my  work schedule means I’m now back and able to invest some time again.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been furiously developing solutions for a variety of clients, and in that time I’ve amassed a few different chunks of code that stand alone well enough, and are potentially generally useful enough, to be open sourced. Now I finally have some time, I’m going to start getting them out there, and hopefully get enough interest to get other developers involved.

So the first project, provisionally named ORMDroid, is an Object Relational Mapping framework for the Android platform. It grew (and is still growing) out of a quick (and very basic) solution that was created for a bespoke app a while ago and is still very simple – over time we’ve added features we’ve needed, and no more (well, not much more).

Why write an Android ORM framework? Well, at the time ORM on Android wasn’t served all that well. The two main solutions didn’t fit our needs – ORMLite just isn’t, well, lite enough, and ActiveAndroid‘s licensing doesn’t fit in with our ethos. Plus, for what we actually needed at the time it was fairly simple to hammer together a solution, which has grown since then through various iterations into the ORMDroid framework we’re using (and now open-sourcing) today.

The name may change soon (ORMDroid is just an internal name, and it turns out there’s already a project on Google code called ORMDroid, although it’s currently empty) and the API is certain to change, but right now it’s capable of managing very simple persistence mapping automatically for you. We’ve found it to be quite capable, and especially useful for getting database driven apps up and running quickly when the client just won’t wait!

The project has just found it’s way onto Google code (it’s at http://code.google.com/p/orm-droid/) and is currently source-only, but if you’re interested in ORM on the android platform come on over and take a look at the code (We’re using subversion as it’s fits with what we use in the lab). It’d be great to get any feedback, and even better to get some people involved.

Project page: http://code.google.com/p/orm-droid/
Source browser: http://code.google.com/p/orm-droid/source/browse/