Testing and reporting company Telerik is now offering its object relational mapping tool free of charge across a range of database platforms. OpenAccess ORM will now be priced at no cost “beyond” Microsoft databases to all 12 database platforms it supports including SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and IDMDB2.
This move appears to have been taken in the classic commercial open source sense; i.e., the company will continue to enhance OpenAccess ORM with regular releases, and will still offer dedicated support via Premium and Ultimate Collection bundles.
NOTE: OpenAccess ORM is a framework for mapping the objects in an object-oriented domain model to relational database tables, views, and/or stored procedures and vice versa. Mapping is done within Visual Studio and is independent from source code and database. Operating as a datastore-agnostic virtual layer, OpenAccess ORM can be used from within the programming language to access and manipulate data.
The Telerik ORM tool works in all .NET platforms: ASP.NET, AJAX, MVC, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Forms, and Azure. The enterprise-grade ORM for .NET (still free of charge, but unsupported in the “enterprise” sense unless additional payment is made) was recently updated to include a new Web Services Wizard that exposes the application data to client applications using various web services, without having developers write a single line of code.
“Telerik OpenAccess ORM takes over the tasks of generating the data access code for an application, effectively relieving users from a portion of their relational data persistence tasks. The generated code has been tested by Telerik and conforms to the latest object-oriented development standards. By doing the heavy lifting for customers, OpenAccess ORM can save users between 20% and 85% of development and testing time,” said the company.
