Cocoa and ODBC

Its being a long time I have not come here to write... and it has been a long journey since a nice tool come to the desktop to connect a relational database with Cocoa (inside OSX). Since the introduction of the Core Data framework, some years after the deprecation of Objective-C version of EOF, it became a bit of a nightmare to connect an app to a Relational Data Base (as may be Sybase or Oracle)... some attempts to rewrite EOF has been done, e.g. in Alex' Open EOF by Martin

The aim of this new attempt is to use the following mixture: The Odbc Framework is a Cocoa framework providing access to ODBC data sources. It works on top of the iODBC Framework which is a widely portable C-oriented framework that follows the ODBC specification (Open Database Connectivity). The Odbc Framework includes a Cocoa Core Data Persistent Store for Odbc, which will be used here. And finally, we will use as persistence the proposed database Mimer SQL  (: which has a free version for developers :)

What's NeXT?

The next step to successfully use Web Services to substitute Cocoa EOF is to publish into a service an EOEditingContext. In this way, Core Data should be able to use EOF, via those services offered by the Editing Context, as a persistence media.

I am not quite sure where to put the line (the service); on top of the Editing Context? or, even below it?
To transfer Enterprise Objects? or, shall I transfer Dictionaries?... it will depend in the performance... we will see.

By the moment, the idea is to have, in the server side, the persistence mechanisms offered by EOF; and in the client side, a Cocoa app running Core Data to manage Display Groups and all the consistency necessary in a complex db-model. For, the model will have to be duplicated in the two formats: .eomodeld and .xcdatamodel ...

... welcome to a new nightmare!

Where to go from CEO?

My first impression is that there is no other technology like Cocoa EO so integrated to OS X, however I may be wrong. In the last two releases of the OS X, vers. 3 and 4 (better known as Panther and Tiger, resp.), two nice technologies had been included in the "free" DevTools: namely, Bindings and Core Data. Watching the big picture, these frameworks looks like an attempt from Apple to rediscover Enterprise Objects, but now fully integrated into Cocoa — like if they were porting EOF back from Java to Objective-C again. To this to become a reality, one piece is still missing: the connectivity to a RDBM (like Sybase, Oracle, MySQL...); in EO terms, EOAccess layer...

The question is now: is Apple including this missing piece into Leopard (OS X 10.5)? NDA aside, no one knows for sure. WWDC was held a few days ago and, at least in the public statement, there is no light that this will happen soon.

On the other hand, Web Objects has become a natural citizen of OS X since it was integrated to Tiger — into Xcode 2.2.x — and it includes a nice technology called Web services, which is based on SOAP. I have not tried yet, but it may be a possibility to code a "service provider/consumer framework" to emulate the Access layer... let us try that for the moment.