Customer Reviews

Persistence in the Enterprise: A Guide to Persistence Technologies

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This unique, well-produced book is, in fact, more than a review of today's leading Java persistence technologies. The book sets the stage with a view from 10,000 feet. The authors briefly recall the history of how we got to where we are today. This is a highly useful perspective that helps the reader understand how each technology milestone in turn contributed to the next one: from JDBC to TopLink to EJB to Hibernate to iBATIS to EJB3/JPA to pureQuery and so on. I can't think of a better way to develop a solid understanding of the Java persistence problem-solution landscape than to appreciate the set of problems each new framework aimed to solve and the extent to which each technology succeeded or failed.

After laying the above context, the book outlines factors to consider when evaluating persistence technologies in order to pick the technology that is optimal for the task at hand.

Finally, the book provides detailed overviews (and comparisons) of five key Java persistence technologies: JDBC, iBATIS, Hibernate, OpenJPA, and pureQuery/Project Zero. These overviews consistently build upon the problem-solution landscape described in the first few chapters and include a common working example that has been implemented using each of the five technologies.

The end result of this one-of-a-kind book is a very satisfying and competent recap of the current Java persistence landscape.

8 horseshoes:

"Persistence in the Enterprise" helps architects pick the right persistence technology for JEE applications. The books is written from a "we the IBM consultants" point of view. I liked this as it made the five author book more consistent.

The persistence technologies evaluated are JDBC, iBatis, Hibernate Core (not the JPA implementation), Apache Open JPA and IBM's Pure Query. The last one seemed like plugging IBM tools, but the others were really good. Similarly Open JPA was chosen to represent JPA since it used by WebSphere (and WebLogic for that matter.) This was fine because the ideas apply to all JPA implementations.

The stated goals of the book are to provide "an end to end view of choosing a persistence technology" and "help clients exploit the WebSphere product suite." These dual goals worked well for them. Luckily, the first goal dominates. The authors go into a lot of detail describing the criteria used for evaluating and comparing.

The book did spend some time describing basic database concepts that I'd like to think an architect already knows. Starting with the criteria in chapter four, things got excellent. The following five chapters describe each persistence technology with sample code implementing CRUD. It's not meant to teach the language - just to show what a solution consists of. They also include literature references, ORM features and tuning options.

The last chapter includes five pages of tables to easily compare technologies along with what each technology is best for. Overall, this book is a good value if you are choosing a persistence technology. It saves countless hours of time in research and analysis.

Surprisingly this book has an excellent overview of Hibernate which you won't easily find elsewhere.