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Java Data Objects
Craig Russell, at Sun Microsystems, is the specification lead for JDO and David Jordan, at Object Identity, has been an active member of the JDO expert group since its inception.
Java Data Objects provides a thorough coverage of JDO and explains how it can be used in various architectures. The reader is expected to be familiar with Java but needs only a limited knowledge of databases. In brief, Java Data Objects (JDO) insulates you from needing to know a lot about databases. JDO permits you to develop applications using your preferred Java object-oriented model, without you having to write code to translate between Java objects and how the data is stored in the database--JDO takes care of all of that for you.
The first three chapters provide a high level overview of JDO by walking through a small application, exploring each of its interfaces at a high level, and introducing the architectures it might be used in. Even if you have been away from code for a while you will be able to follow most of the code example. You can stop here if you just want to understand what JDO is all about and where it can be used. These are recommended reading for a manager.
Chapters 4 through 9 are required reading if you want to start developing JDO applications. They really get you into JDO, so you can understand it and start using it. The first three of these cover how to define persistent classes and fields, how they can be mapped to various databases (done for you) and the class enhancement process (which makes a lot of JDO transparent to you). The next three (chapter 7 through 9) bring home the power of JDO. These cover how to connect with a database, establish a transaction context and create, read, query, update and delete database objects. The material is made concrete by illustrating it with a detailed and intuitive example application. This example is carried throughout the book with sections of it explained as the concepts are covered.
Each remaining chapter covers a different JDO concept or feature (including optional features) that were introduced earlier but not covered in detail to keep the earlier chapters more understandable. These remaining topics are identity, lifecycle states & transitions, field management, cache management, nontransactional access and optimistic transactions. You can read these chapters as you feel the need for a more in-depth understanding of these concepts.
The last two chapters explain how to use JDO in an application-server environment and an Enterprise Java Beans environment. These two chapters assume you are already familiar with these environments, but I think a lot of it is understandable even if you are not.
There are five appendices with everything from the lifecycle state transitions to the collected source code for many of the classes used in the example application.
You can purchase Java Data Objects from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
First of all, I wouldn't want to hire that developer. Secondly, that is not entirely correct. O/R frameworks are useful in that they provide a consistent interface
I've been using torque (from Apache, under the DB project).
l oyee emp = new Employee();
One row in the db equates to one object with all the appropriate getters and setters.
I haven't been using Torque for anything too complicated, but it definitely passes the test of making the simple things simple, and area I find Java to be weak in.
For instance:
Torque.init("Torque.properties");
Emp
e.setName("Dave");
e.save();
That's all there is to creating a row in the db. There are correspondingly simple operations for select, update and delete so long as you are working on one table at a time. Its a bit messier working with joins.
Its also messy and poorly documented when doing work on the select side of the statement. While "select max(emp_id) from employees" is doable, its not as simple as it could be considering how common select max() is.
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I've said it once, and i'll say it again.
These book reviews on Slashdot, at times informative, really just are letting people know about the book and not as much reviewing that.
This demonstrated is that in the last two months, no book has received less than a 80% approval rating by the author (unless you rate a 'very good' as < 8). It's like Homer Simpson is writing these reviews, "This (book) gets my lowest rating ever, seven thumbs up."
I mean honestly, a review needs to have a few lemons on its record. I think someone should review a Wrox book on Linux and have it summarized with, "This book really gobbled the cob. it wouldn't be fit to line the kitchen floor for my puppy to soil in the evenings."
Instead of calling it 'Slashdot Book Review', it should just be called 'Slashdots list of books that rule'.
That's just my opinion though, I could be wrong.
Before you commit to JDO or entity beans, do yourself a favor and also look at OJB and Hibernate. Both of these object-relational mapping (ORM) tools offer unintrusive presistence to your existing beans (unlike Toplink and Cocobase which require you use their collection types) and don't require you to run a byte-code mangler like JDO.