Replacing a full ORM (JPA/Hibernate) by a lighter solution : Recommended patterns for load/save?

Question

I\'m developing a new Java web application and I\'m exploring new ways (new for me!) to persist the data. I mostly have experience with JPA & Hibernate but, except for simpl

Answer 1

This kind of problem is typical when not using a real ORM, and there is no silver bullet. A simple design approach that worked for me for a (not very big ) webapp with iBatis (myBatis), is to use two layers for persistence:

• A dumb low-level layer: each table has its Java class (POJO or DTO), with fields that maps directly to the table columns. Say we have a PERSON table with a ADDRESS_ID field that points to an ADRESS table; then, we'd have a PersonDb class, with just a addressId (integer) field; we have no personDb.getAdress() method, just the plain personDb.getAdressId(). These Java classes are, then, quite dumb (they don't know about persistence or about related classes). A corresponding PersonDao class knows how to load/persist this object. This layer is easy to create and maintain with tools like iBatis + iBator (or MyBatis + MYBatisGenerator).

• A higher level layer that contains rich domain objects: each of these is typically a graph of the above POJOs. These classes have also the intelligence for loading/saving the graph (perhaps lazily, perhaps with some dirty flags), by calling the respective DAOs. The important thing, however, is that these rich domain objects do not map one-to-one to the POJO objects (or DB tables), but rather with domain use cases. The "size" of each graph is determined (it doesn't grow indefinitely), and is used from the outside like a particular class. So, it's not that you have one rich Person class (with some indeterminate graph of related objects) that is used is several use cases or service methods; instead, you have several rich classes, PersonWithAddreses, PersonWithAllData... each one wraps a particular well-limited graph, with its own persistence logic. This might seem inefficient or clumsy, and in some context it might be, but it happens often that the use cases when you need to save a full graph of objects are actually limited.

• Additionally, for things like tabular reports, (specific SELECTS that return a bunch of columns to be displayed) you'd not use the above, but straight and dumb POJO's (perhaps even Maps)

See my related answer here