Would you use iBatis.Net today?

Question

I have been using the Java version of iBatis for years now, recently I decided to use it with C# as well so I went to the website to get the files and I am a little uncomfortable with what I saw. The documentation dates 2007 and it refers to .Net 2, iBatis.Net just feels abandoned.

I really like iBatis, I have tried Entity Framework and NHibernate but I still prefer iBatis. I am currently using Visual Studio 2010. Can you please tell me your experiences with iBatis.Net (and preferable with VS 2010)? Should I use it ? Do you believe that it has any future ?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

IBatis.Net moved to MyBatis.Net; see MyBatis web site.

I used IBatis.Net in many C# projects. The use of ORMs can be viewed as an opposition or complementary with the approach used by IBatis.

Linq2Sql or EntityFramework or NHibernate are ORMs, IBatis is a statement to object mapper; I prefer to use IBatis when:

• I do not own the database
• The DB schema of the DB is highly normalized and designed for relational use
• The DB schema is larger than the application domain
• The DB offers a Procedure API: a set of procedures that abstracts tables and SQL operations on them
• When very custom SQL tuning is needed
• When I need to give access to SQL, apart from the binary solution, to DBAs

Consider you can use a mix and choose an ORM to map tables and IBatis to map statements.

Answer 2

While iBatis.NET doesn't quite look like it is abandoned, it does look close. As of my writing this there have only been 2 commits in the last year and no new releases in the last 2 years. In the long term that makes me nervous and I wouldn't use it on new projects unless I was willing to maintain the code myself should worse come to worse and the framework itself needs a fix.

I am not addressing the merits of iBatis vs any other library in terms of functionality, only in terms of risk maintenance-wise.