Where is the line between DAL and ORM?

Question

The terms are often thrown around interchangeably, and there\'s clearly considerable overlap, but just as often it seems implied that people see something strongly implied by sa

Answer 1

ORM didn't exist when I started programming. When the first ORMs came out, they were external tools used to create the DAL. Now days, DAL and ORM have intermingled. That's why a lot of developers use the terms interchangeably.

The most well known example of an ORM that functions as a DAL is NHibernate. Other examples are Subsonic and CSLA.NET. These are all .NET tools. IIRC, ORM tools started in the Java world. Other technologies stacks then copied what Java has done.