Bold for Delphi is an Object Relational Mapper(ORM) and application framework. It's designed to significantly increase developer's productivity providing them with the following facilities:
- Object-relational mapping for persisting domain objects
- UML modeling of domain classes
- OCL as means of making queries (in-memory or to DB)
Modeling
As in true model-driven environment model is a central part of an Bold application. The developer alters the model and the changes are applied automatically to the underlying implementation. This allows developers to concentrate on the problem domain model instead of drowning in the implementation specifics. In particular there is no need to take care of database design that makes Bold applications more object-oriented and less database-oriented. Model construction in Bold is done in visual Rational Rose 2003 UML editor. There is also a builtin editor that lack the UML diagrams. The corresponding code is generated on the fly in Delphi code.
Object persistence
ECO performs object-relational mapping based on metadata which is taken from the model or from xml file. It implements such advanced object persistence features as caching, lazy load and others.