Chapter 7. Rapidity and the Database

Although there is a perverse sense of pleasure to be had from writing carefully optimized data access code, the repetitive and error-prone nature of the task soon reduces it to a menial chore.

The J2EE platform offers a sophisticated set of services for accessing relational database management systems (RDBMS), yet despite these services, many developers find the task of writing data access code for enterprise systems a time-consuming and laborious process.

This chapter examines the problems relational databases present for the rapid developer. By applying the techniques covered in the previous chapters, we look at how the right development tools and code generation techniques can help to alleviate the issues identified with writing data access code.

Specifically, we focus on the open source tools Hibernate and Middlegen; two products that can ease the frustrations often associated with implementing a persistence layer by both simplifying data access technology and reducing the amount of code we must write.

First, let's examine the problems relational databases present the enterprise specialist.