ORM and Angular -- Make Your App Smarter

Posted by Gilad F on Back& Blog.

Current approaches to web development rely upon having two kinds of intelligence built into your application – business intelligence in the server, and presentation intelligence on the client side. This institutes a clear delineation in responsibilities, which is often desirable from an architectural standpoint. However, this approach does have some drawbacks.

Processing time for business logic, for example, is centralized on the server. This can introduce bottlenecks in the application’s performance, or add complexity when it comes to cross-server communication. For smaller applications that nonetheless have a large user base, this can often be the single greatest performance concern – the time spent computing solutions by the server. One way this can be offset is through the use of Object-Relational Mapping, or ORM. Below we’ll look at the concept of ORM, and how creating an ORM system in Angular can help make your application smarter.

What is an ORM?

Simply put, Object-Relational Mapping is the concept of creating representations of your underlying data that know how to manage themselves. Most web applications boil down to four basic actions, known as the “CRUD” approach – Create a record, Retrieve records, Update a record, or Delete a record. With an ORM, you simply encapsulate each of these functions within a class that represents a given record in the database. In essence, the objects you create to represent your data on the front end also know how to manipulate that data on the back end.

Why Use an ORM?

The primary benefit of an ORM is that it hides a lot of the functional complexity of database integration behind an established API. Communication with the database to implement each of the CRUD methods can be complex, but once it’s been accomplished for one model it can be easily ported to all of the other models in your system. An ORM focuses on hiding as much of this code as possible, allowing your models to care only about how they are represented – and how they interact with other elements in the system. A series of calls to establish a connection to the database, for example, becomes a single call to a method named “Save” on the model instance. This also allows you to centralize your database code, giving you only one location where you need to look for database-related bugs instead of having to search a complex code base for different custom data communication handlers.

Why Use an ORM in Angular?

While the JavaScript stack is particularly performant when compared to more heavyweight offerings such as Rails and Django, it still faces the issues common to the standard web application architecture – the server has the potential to be a bottleneck, handling the incoming traffic from a number of locations. By focusing your development efforts to create a pure CRUD API in your server, and developing a rudimentary ORM in Angular, you can offload a lot of that processing load to the client machines – in essence parallelizing the process at the expense of increased network communication. This allows you to reduce the overall dependence of your application on the server, making the server a “thin” client that simply updates the database based upon the API calls issued by the client. After a certain point, your back-end can be outsourced completely to an external provider that specializes in providing this type of access – such as Backand – allowing you to completely offload scalability and security concerns. In essence, it allows you to focus on your application as opposed to focusing on the attendant resources.

Conclusion

Object-Relational Mapping is a powerful paradigm that eases communication with a database for the basic CRUD activities associated with web applications. As most existing web development environments focus on implementing ORM on the server side, this can result in performance and communication bottlenecks – not to mention increased infrastructure costs. By offloading some of these ORM tasks to AngularJS, you can parallelize many of these tasks and reduce overall server load, in some cases obviating the need for the server entirely. If your application is facing a bloated back-end communication pattern, it might be worth your time to look at working towards implementation of a client-side ORM system.

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