Chapter 11. Persisting data with object-relational mapping

 

This chapter covers

  • Working with Spring and Hibernate
  • Writing Spring-free repositories with contextual sessions
  • Using JPA with Spring
  • Automatic JPA repositories with Spring Data

When we were kids, riding a bike was fun, wasn’t it? We’d ride to school in the mornings. When school let out, we’d cruise to our best friend’s house. When it got late and our parents were yelling at us for staying out past dark, we’d peddle home for the night. Gee, those days were fun.

Then we grew up, and now we need more than a bike. Sometimes we have to travel a long distance to work. Groceries have to be hauled, and our kids need to get to soccer practice. And if we live in Texas, air conditioning is a must! Our needs have outgrown our bikes.

JDBC is the bike of the persistence world. It’s great for what it does, and for some jobs it works fine. But as applications become more complex, so do our persistence requirements. We need to be able to map object properties to database columns and have our statements and queries created for us, freeing us from typing an endless string of question marks. We also need features that are more sophisticated:

11.1. Integrating Hibernate with Spring

11.2. Spring and the Java Persistence API

11.3. Automatic JPA repositories with Spring Data

11.4. Summary