Professional BlazeDS: Creating Rich Internet Applications with Flex® and Java®

7.9. Summary

Starting with the object/relational mismatch, this chapter covers a whole gamut of topics that relate to Flex and Java persistence. In a brief exposition, differences between the relational and object-oriented world were considered in the context of granularity, inheritance, polymorphism, relationships, and identity.

Next, the chapter covered the fundamentals of JPA, and Hibernate. JPA was introduced via a complete example. The example itself was rudimentary, but it brought many aspects of configuration, entity definition, annotations, and entity manager to light. If you were a newbie and knew little or nothing about JPA, then this section hopefully brought you up to speed. If you already knew a lot about JPA, then it might have served the purpose of a quick review. After JPA, Hibernate essentials were covered. The coverage of Hibernate was minimal, and almost all of the content was restricted to the core Hibernate features. There was absolutely no discussion of the Hibernate validator, annotations, search, or shards.

Once the fundamentals of Java persistence were covered, the topic of Flex and JPA/Hibernate integration started. The topic started with the demonstration of an anti-pattern, which for some reason has seen some adoption among developers. An example illustrated that eagerly fetching all Hibernate records is not a wise approach. The example was complete in its own right and hopefully acted as a pointer for what might go wrong if you don't use a specialized ...