Preface

It is never too late to become reasonable and wise; but if the insight comes late, there is always more difficulty in starting the change.

—Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

Java database programming has grown much more complex than it was in 1996 when I wrote the first edition of my book Database Programming with JDBC and Java (O'Reilly & Associates). The J2EE platform did not exist. Distributed programming was RMI, JDBC was simple, and transaction management and persistence did not exist in the Java vocabulary. Database programming in 1996 was quite simply JDBC programming.

To place database programming in a real-world context, I spent much of that book introducing ways to build robust persistence models and manage transactions using only the JDBC API. As you can imagine, you had to do a lot of things for yourself that developers now take for granted in the Java platform.

The Java world has certainly changed since then. Not only does Java provide you with a persistence model, it provides you with three different persistence models built right into the core J2EE platform. Outside the J2EE platform is the popular JDO persistence model. In addition, many tools exist to enable you to effectively use third-party and custom persistence models. All of these choices present a problem for database programmers that simply did not exist in 1996: what are the best approaches to database programming with the Java language?

This book seeks to aid the Java developer in appreciating the different approaches Java provides for database programming. It helps you assess what approaches fit which problems, and what the best practices are under each model.