Customer Reviews

Java Persistence for Relational Databases (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

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As the title indicates, this book takes a look at different methods in Java for persisting data to a relational database. JDBC, EJB CMP 2.0, ODMG 3.0, JDO, open source frameworks (Hibernate and Castor), and commercial frameworks (TopLink, CocoBase) are all given a look. The author touches on rolling your own persistence framework, and throws in a little bit about relevant design patterns and unit testing.

Overall this book left me with more questions than answers. Often we are told what the capabilities of a given library or framework are, but not how to make use of those capabilities. Frequently we are teased with a bit of information, only to be told that we need to go to another source to find anything of substance. Just as often, a promising topic such as unit testing the persistence layer is left inadequately addressed.

If you are looking for a broad overview on the book's subject, then this book may be for you. However, while this book ostensibly should help a manager or developer choose a persistence method suitable for his project, I'm afraid no guidelines are given as to when one particular method may be preferable to another. Although we can't expect a book such as this to be all encompassing, many sections in this book urge the reader to look elsewhere for more information. In this case, that might not be such bad advice.