Solving the Java object storage problem

Abstract

Today's Internet driven view of information systems is helping to popularize Java as an application development language. Developers are beginning to use Java to create multi tier application architectures that often integrate relational data stores with new data types, in order to package information in easier to use, dynamic ways. Java's object oriented nature is ideally suited to this new world. Using objects, Java developers can encapsulate both data and data manipulation methods to give applications a runtime dynamism and self-contained intelligence that is difficult to achieve using other methods. Java application developers need to be able to store these Java objects-technically, to give them persistence-in order to take advantage of these capabilities. We examine the development issues surrounding Java object storage, including a brief overview of the ODMG Java binding, a standard that adds object persistence to Java. We compare this with the much greater level of effort required to implement the same application using the lower level JDBC interface, which supports Java object storage in relational databases. The ODMG binding for Java and JDBC are not competitive specifications: ODMG interfaces can be built on top of JDBC.