Persist This(); Comparing Java Persistent Frameworks

Studies have suggested that somewhere between 30-70 percent of an application?s code and an equal percentage of a developer?s time is spent working with JDBC and SQL elements! It?s no wonder that software development teams looking to boost productivity are looking to persistence frameworks, but which one to choose? Options for a Java persistent framework include Hibernate, iBatis, Castor, JDO, the new Java Persistence API along with some proprietary frameworks. This presentation explains, demonstrates, and compares each of the viable options to one another. Attendees will learn how a graph of related Java objects can be persisted with each framework and they will gain an appreciation for the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. The talk will try to answer questions such as: how easy/difficult is it to setup each framework, which framework takes the most/least amount of time to learn, which framework works best on top of an existing database, which framework is the most flexible, and which framework provides the best performance with minimal tuning?

The talk will also compare the framework solutions to straight JDBC/SQL code to see how much real savings can be accomplished with a persistence framework. Using a medium sized example graph of objects that contains inheritance, various object-to-object associations and attributes of many different data types, attendees will be shown a demonstration of the setup, API and mapping facilities of each framework. Statistics on the footprint, performance and amount of code using each framework will be shared along with guidance on how the statistics might be affected in other graphs and application environments.

Attendees of this presentation should be familiar with Java, JDBC and relational database concepts.