Persistence in the Enterprise: A Guide to Persistence Technologies

Ratings and Stats

ISBN:	0131587560	Relevance:	5
Publisher:	IBM Press	Readability:	4
Author(s):	Roland Barcia; Geoffrey Hambrick; Kyle Brown; Robert Peterson; Kulvir Singh Bhogal	Overall:	4
Bottom Line:	Persistence in the Enterprise is currently the best book out there for a Java developer to learn and also to compare the various persistence frameworks before commiting to any one of them blindly. The best aspects of this book are the clear explanations, working examples and great teaching style.

Intent and Audience

If you are using a home grown persistence framework, or considering to write one, or trying to move from one framework to another; you should read this book before you venture into either one of these scenarios.

Instead of hiring consultants to choose the right persistence framework for your organization, have your Java Developers read this book and get the job done for under $50.

Chapter Highlights

This book is mainly divided into two parts:

Part 1, "A Question of Persistence", helps the reader understand the many issues and trade-offs we normally face while choosing a persistence framework. This part has 4 chapters that cover the following:

Chapter 1 - A brief history of Object-Relational Mapping. This gives a brief history lesson of some popular relational database persistence mechanisms associated with a few object-oriented languages.

Chapter 2 - High Level Requirements and Persistence. As the name itself suggests, this chapter discusses IT requirements around your persistence framework that you should consider.

Chapter 3 - Designing Persistent Object Services. This chapter introduces the reader to some fundamentals and best practices of domain modeling. Also discusses some common strategies of mapping a domain model to a database with an example-driven approach.

Chapter 4 - Evaluating your Options. This chapter takes you through some best practices for conducting an evaluation based on an objective questionnaire, which is used as a template for comparison in part 2. The questionnaire is very comprehensive, and covers the following sections:

• Background
• Architectural Overview
• Programming Model
• ORM Features Supported
• Tuning options
• Development Process for the Common Example

Part 2, "Comparing Apples to Apples". This part has 6 chapters, the first five cover five frameworks using the approach and questionnaire discussed in chapter 4. The five frameworks covered in the next few chapters are

• Chapter 5 JDBC
• Chapter 6 Apache iBatis
• Chapter 7 Hibernate Core
• Chapter 8 Apache OpenJPA
• Chapter 9 pureQuery and ProjectZero

Part 2 is finished with Chapter 10 which gives a summary that compares the mechanisms side by side and goes through a few scenarios in which one or the other best applies.

Appendix - Setting Up the Common Example. This section shows you how to set up and run the example for each persistence framework discussed. It has almost 30 pages, and has every detail and screen shots to get the examples working using Apache Derby as the database, Eclipse as the IDE, and JUnit and DbUnit as the testing frameworks.

Each and every chapter has a summary section, links to developerworks, and references which are really valuable.

Relevance of Material

While this book cannot be used as a reference for any of the persistence frameworks covered, it does an excellent job of teaching a programmer how to use them with working examples. The authors have come up with a template which can be used for comparing other frameworks as well. I would recommed every Java developer to read this book before they start writing their own persistence frameworks.

Resources

You can find the soft copy of the questionnaire at the link below:

• Questionnaire

Download the source code here:

• Source code

P.S: For those of you who are Safari Books Online subscribers, the book is available there in:
http://safari.informit.com/9780131587564.