ECOOP / Tutorial 27

Patterns for Persisting Objects in Relational Databases

Topic	Persistence, Relational Databases, Mapping Objects
Goal	Understand the principles and patterns for storing objects in relational databases. Attendees will also learn how to build a framework to map their objects to a relational database and will also gain working code and an object-model that they will be able to take with them and use in a production environment.
Style	Presentation + demo + discussion

Abstract

For developing simple client-server applications, there are visual languages in many developing environments for generating the mappings of GUI's to database values and domain objects. For complex applications, tools such as TOPLink are very useful for simplifying the creation of persistent objects while hiding their implementation details. Quite often, application development requires tools for persistence that fall in between these two extremes.
Just using the facilities provided by JDBC or EJBs is not sufficient to work with objects. JDBC forces developers to work at the SQL level with rows and columns. Application developers do want or need to write SQL statements to read or store their objects; they are busy solving the domain problem. This presentation will describe how to make business objects persistent by mapping them to a relational database with minimal effort. It will also examine the patterns used to map domain-objects to a relational database.
Participants of this tutorial will learn a set of patterns and a language-independent object model that can be used for mapping business objects to a relational database. They will also learn how to develop a data access layer along with the design patterns used in the database tools provided by VisualAge and TOPLink.

Presenter Profile

Joseph W. Yoder

Joseph W. Yoder has worked on the architecture, design, and implementation of various software projects dating back to 1985. These projects have incorporated many technologies and range from stand-alone to client-server applications, multi-tiered, databases, object-oriented, frameworks, human-computer interaction, collaborative environments, web-based, and domain-specific visual-languages. In addition these projects have spanned many domains, including Medical Information Systems, Manufacturing Systems, Medical Examination Systems, Statistical Analysis, Scenario Planning, Client-Server Relational Database System for keeping track of shared specifications in a multi-user environment, Telecommunications Billing System, and Business & Medical Decision Making. Recently his focus has been on how to build dynamic and adaptable systems. This has led to work on Adaptive Object-Models which are systems that have an architecture to allow for systems to adapt to changing requirements without programming.
Joe is one of the principles of The Refactory Inc. and has assisted many companies with the development of software applications, specifically object-oriented and web-based systems. He has mentored object-oriented developers and provided internal training on using patterns to assist with object-oriented development. Recently he has been teaching Java, Smalltalk, Patterns, Frameworks, Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and has mentored analysts and developers on many of their applications.
Joe is the author of over two-dozen published patterns and has been working with patterns for a long time, writing his first pattern paper in 1995, and was the conference chair for the PLoP'97, conference on software patterns and was the programming chair of The Second Latin American Conference on Pattern Languages of Programming.

Details

Presenter(s)	Joseph W. Yoder, The Refactory, Inc.
Date Duration	Tuesday, 22 half day
Level	intermediate
Targeted Audience	This tutorial is intended for those who are developing client/server applications and in need for an easy to use persistence manager that is powerful enough to store their domain objects into a relational database. It is also useful for those who want to understand the general principles of how persistent managers work. The attendees will benefit from gaining insight into how to build a framework to map their objects to a relational database and will also gain working code and an object-model that they will be able to take with them and use in a production environment.