Greg: Truly and honestly, I am glad that there are some projects where relatively advanced needs like yours are being met, and where the programmers are so good and so consistent that they don't need code generators to help them out. I would say that RAP has little to offer you.

Not all of us are so fortunate however. I operate in environments where the databases don't have explicitly declared primary keys, foreign keys, indexes, and so forth, and the whole thing more resembles a collection of "flat files" than a database. I would guess that at least half the application programmers out there couldn't tell you what an ORM is, let alone enumerate the features of Entity Framework. The vast majority of programmers working today probably could not tell you what "first normal form" is, nor would they care enough to tolerate an explanation. Almost all the schema desigs I've seen feature grossly inconsistent uses of keys and status fields and are consequently a nightmare to maintain. The code (both in the database and the app) is generally a pile of undocumented spaghetti that requires hours for me to discern the intended funcionality. Outside of the few best-managed companies, his is the industry norm I'm afraid.

RAP is intended to raise the standards of the enormous bottom end of the industry by doing automatically what apparently so many programmers cannot or will not do for themselves. American industry is losing vast sums of money due to the poor design, inefficency and high error rate of the software that it pays people to develop. In my opinion, easily half the running apps today are dismal design failures whose shortcomings are not obvious only because most American management is basically uninterested in either application design or quality control ... and because there are no obvious alternatives. And I'm not even counting here the apps that were such total failures that they never even entered production.

It seems to me that all of American business is potentially poised for a smackdown comparable to what happened to our auto industry. If most of our underlying apps and schemas resemble most of the stuff I've seen, our companies will be fundamentally unable to respond to any challenge from anyone using any serious software quality control mechanisms. Could there come a day when essentially all American business is noncompetitive due to poor software app quality? Fifty years ago if you had suggested that the American automobile market would someday be dominated by non-Americans, and that they would dominate predominantly based upon their quality control (which derives from consistency), you would have been laughed at.

So please bear with me. Most app designers couldn't design a comprehensive auditing system on a dare; RAP gives it to them for free. Most apps don't do concurrency management; RAP provides it automatically. Most apps don't dare to ever actually delete records, thereby defeating referential integrity and smothering live data in obsolete data; RAP solves all these problems automatically. The list goes on and on.

So no, RAP is not trying to compete with top-end designs requiring the full features of Entity Framework. RAP is at the other end, trying to clean up the enormous mess.