developerWorks: Object-Relation Mapping Without the Container

“If you follow the latest developer buzz then you’ve likely
heard of IOC (Inversion of Control) containers and AOP
(aspect-oriented programming). Like many developers, however, you
may not see where these technologies fit into your development
efforts. In this article, I’ll begin to remedy that, with a
hands-on introduction to using Hibernate and Spring to build a
transactional persistence tier for your enterprise
applications.

“Hibernate is a popular, easy-to-use, open source
object-relation (OR) mapping framework for the Java platform.
Spring is an AOP framework and IOC container. Together, these two
technologies will provide the foundation of your development
efforts in this article. You’ll use Hibernate to map some
persistent objects to a relational database and Spring to make
Hibernate easier to use and provide declarative transaction
support. As an added bonus, I’ll throw in a little TDD (test-driven
development), as DbUnit was used to write the test code for the
example classes.

“Note that this article assumes that you are familiar with
enterprise development on the Java platform, including JDBC, OR
mapping issues, J2EE design patterns like DAO, and declarative
transaction support such as that provided by Enterprise JavaBeans
(EJB) technology. You are not expected to be an expert in any of
these technologies in order to follow the discussion, nor do you
need to be familiar with AOP, IOC, or TDD, as all three will be
introduced in the article…”

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