* You can use a data mapper approach with NHibernate, but not Castle ActiveRecord.
* Castle has logging and caching support, more robust than WORW, though a bit more complex to set up. In fact when writing WORW I referred to Castle’s stuff and NHibernate quite a bit.
* There are ActiveRecord generators, even a graphical one.

That being said, I could probably port WORW to NHibernate, if necessary, but I’m not sure how some things would change as a result.

One thing that is very nice about WORM WORW is it’s very easy to get up and running, and has very narrow dependencies (two DLLs if you don’t use optional components, compared to six for NHibernate AR. Still, that’s hardly a big negative.

On the IsReadOnly thing — there is a BindableAttribute. You can try this on IsReadOnly:

[Bindable(false)]

Let me know if that works for you — if it does I’ll commit it to the trunk.

my 2 cents on Castle’s AR vs. WORW:

AR Pros:
* Active project and huge developer community
* Built on NHibernate (I like WORM better but this seems to be the more recognized ORM and has the active developer community)
* I like the validation attributes

WORW Pros:
* Allows for either ActiveRecord or Data Mapper approaches
* Has built-in logging and caching support
* Has Codesmith templates for generating mapping, entity and unit testing code
* Generated classes hook into the ObjectDataSource control nicely out of the box

Does that pretty much sum up things? If anything is left out or incorrect about my assessment I’d like to know.

As a side note … is there an attribute you can set on the IsReadOnly property on EntityBase so the ObjectDataSource control doesn’t see it as a property to work with?

- wayde

Both the aforementioned projects use Paul Wilson’s O/R mapper and the WORW (which I’d call WOW had Blizzard not beat me to the name). I considered moving both to NHibernate/ActiveRecord, but ultimately decided against it because WORW does everything I need and had a shorter learning curve for me.

NHibernate is very robust, and ActiveRecord is a solid framework. Both are very actively developed, which is one thing against Wilson’s O/R mapper (which suffers from a terrible name, but a nice abbreviation in WORM). Both offer features beyond WORM WORW, and probably always will.

If I didn’t already have so much time invested into WORM (and WORW) I probably would be 100% on-board with NHibernate ActiveRecord, but I don’t feel that I’m short-changing myself by choosing not to go with them. WORM WORW do everything I need for now.

Moving to an attribute-based approach is interesting, but it wouldn’t be simple, and it may require changes to WORM as well. The ActiveRecord attributes replace the NHibernate mappings files, so attributes would have to replace/define the mappings config file for WORM. At this point, I don’t expect trying to tackle such an effort.

- wayde

Free is great — let’s just not let the providers of free get away with not getting anything for their efforts.

Textmate
Journler
CSSEdit
Bean
Camino

OpenOffice is something I’m looking at as well since the announcement of the Mac OS X port and today was the first aqua release. Still has a way to go but it’s on my list.