OK I can see a business plan in it and I can't blame people for choosing one way of earning money over another.
Still this is quite sign of the times we live in. If someone's putting most of his service from the pieces hosted elsewhere, what it will be? I can say that it'll be probably sloooow ;)
Anyway I share your sentiment towards ORMs, with a little difference that I prefer data mapper (as a pattern) over active record (as a pattern). Active record locks you in the ghetto where the only primary source of the schema information are your artificially crafted ORM-dependent tables, where in data mapper the database itself can give this information to you via reflection of the "real" tables. This is priceless when dealing not only with legacy databases but also with effects of ad-hoc operational fixes, which in turn can save your production sometimes. Data mapper has got also object identities right.
Still this is quite sign of the times we live in. If someone's putting most of his service from the pieces hosted elsewhere, what it will be? I can say that it'll be probably sloooow ;)
Anyway I share your sentiment towards ORMs, with a little difference that I prefer data mapper (as a pattern) over active record (as a pattern). Active record locks you in the ghetto where the only primary source of the schema information are your artificially crafted ORM-dependent tables, where in data mapper the database itself can give this information to you via reflection of the "real" tables. This is priceless when dealing not only with legacy databases but also with effects of ad-hoc operational fixes, which in turn can save your production sometimes. Data mapper has got also object identities right.