Spring: A Developer's Notebook

Chapter 5. OR Persistence

Near where I live, there's a notorious mountain biking trail with a hill called Beer Mountain. I have no idea how it got its name, because you've got to be stone-cold sober to even contemplate going down. As far as I know, it's never been cleanly climbed (or climbed without stepping off of the bike). Most think it's ridiculous to even try. The hill is long and has an insanely steep gradient. It's covered with loose rock and lots of ledges. I must be too bored with the rest of my life, because I've been working to climb that hill for two and a half years. A hill like that one looks to me like a difficult programming problem. I have started over many times, trying different approaches to the many ledges and boulder gardens on the way to the top. To climb Beer Mountain, I needed to improve my bike, my technique, and my conditioning.

Integrating iBATIS

In a fiasco that's become famous, a sample application from Sun was used as a centerpiece for a benchmark in a widely publicized competition between J2EE and .NET. The .NET version soundly beat the EJB-based J2EE version, and the heat was on. Clinton Begin built a simplified version of PetStore around his persistence framework called iBATIS, and it's grown in popularity ever since. Spring provides excellent iBATIS integration, and we'll look at it in this chapter.

Not all problems are well-suited for full-blown persistence frameworks. They're moderately complicated in the best of circumstances. Without the right ...