Chapter 8. Alternative Persistence Frameworks
Reason must in all its undertakings subject itself to criticism;
should it limit freedom of criticism by any prohibitions, it must
harm itself, drawing upon itself a damaging suspicion. Nothing is so
important through its usefulness, nothing so sacred, that it may be
exempted from this searching examination, which knows no respect for
persons. Reason depends on this freedom for its very existence. For
reason has no dictatorial authority, its verdict is always simply the
agreement of free citizens, of whom each one must be permitted to
express, without let or hindrance, his objection or even his veto. —Immanuel Kant,
The Critique of Pure Reason
As
an enterprise application architect, you have more options than just
choosing between a persistence model blessed by Sun and rolling your
own model. In fact, alternative persistence models have been gaining
in popularity recently for a variety of reasons:
EJBs are complex and heavy and they require an application server. JDBC is time-consuming and requires a significant degree of database
programming skill. JDO is late on the scene and still lacking in implementations.
A quick search of the Internet will reveal a variety of alternative
persistence systems. Two of the most popular are the Castor JDO (not
an implementation of the Sun JDO specification) and Hibernate
projects. This chapter looks at Castor and Hibernate as alternative
XML object-relational mapping tools.
|
Castor and Hibernate are not
a standard part of any Java platform. You therefore need a host of
tools to support these APIs. Each API has a different set of
requirements, which you can find more about at their respective home
pages:
- Castor
-
http://castor.exolabs.org.
- Hibernate
-
http://hibernate.sf.net.
|
 |
