Learn SubSonic before NHibernate or Vice Versa?

Question

We've been using our own DAL for our projects in our company and for the passed 2 projects this has causing us problems. Because of this I want to study SubSonic and/or NHibernate. Is it better to study SubSonic first or NHibernate? What are the advantages/disadvantages? From what I have read from related questions here NHibernate is more complex compared to SubSonic so I want to start with the latter.

Answer 1

I dont know a great deal about SubSonic but I recently took on the task of tooling up with NHibernate and found this book (probably the only one out there really) very useful

Answer 2

SubSonic is significantly easier than NHibernate, you can start working with it almost immediately (few screencasts and you're done). In NHibernate you need some more work to start up – XML config, Session handling and such stuff. So if you are new to ORM, learn SubSonic first, and then delve into NHibernate. Personally I think for small projects you can even happily end up with SubSonic :)

Answer 3

NHibernate is definately more complex, but with that complexity comes greater flexibility. Subsonic is great, but you should also be aware that it's very much an open source project and whilst it's currently stable, it doesn't have the active development community behind it that NHibernate does.

Another thing to be aware of is that subsonic is a sort of "code generator" where it will actually generate a bunch of stuff for you. NHibernate is an ORM in the very literal sense in that you map objects to your database. You can use code generators to generate the mappings for you, but it is a fundamentally different way of thinking about ORMs.

Personally, if you look at subsonic and find that it has everything you need, than I would look at that, or possibly even linq to sql, however if you find you're getting into more complex object problems, then maybe NHibernate is worth learning.

Answer 4

The answer depends on many different factors. If you learn nHibernate, you are opening yourself many doors of learning curves but they all pay off. Sub Sonic can get you up to speed but is based on code generation which means you have boundaries. With nHibernate, you define you own mapping. Infact with Fluent Interface nHibernate mapping, it's much more easier, simpler and faster to map the objects. There is a very active users group link text

Plus you have full flexibility of mapping. nHibernate could be a little hard to start with but it's totally worth learning. I myself have written 2 professional projects for my clients using nHibernate.

Answer 5

SubSonic is an Active Record ORM. If that is what you are looking for you should compare it with other active record ORM's such as Castle. Castle is built on top of nHibernate so your team can expand to full feature set if needed. AT this point your comparing apples to apples and it doesn't matter which one you start with.

If your not looking for an Active Record style ORM try starting with Fluid nHivernate to lower the learning curve a little.