Chapter 1. Understanding object/relational persistence
In this chapter
- Persistence with SQL databases in Java applications
- The object/relational paradigm mismatch
- Introducing ORM, JPA, and Hibernate
This book is about Hibernate; our focus is on using Hibernate as a provider of the Java Persistence API. We cover basic and advanced features and describe some ways to develop new applications using Java Persistence. Often, these recommendations aren’t specific to Hibernate. Sometimes they’re our own ideas about the best ways to do things when working with persistent data, explained in the context of Hibernate.
The approach to managing persistent data has been a key design decision in every software project we’ve worked on. Given that persistent data isn’t a new or unusual requirement for Java applications, you’d expect to be able to make a simple choice among similar, well-established persistence solutions. Think of web application frameworks (JavaServer Faces versus Struts versus GWT), GUI component frameworks (Swing versus SWT), or template engines (JSP versus Thymeleaf). Each of the competing solutions has various advantages and disadvantages, but they all share the same scope and overall approach. Unfortunately, this isn’t yet the case with persistence technologies, where we see some wildly differing solutions to the same problem.