Best way to develop Java with a DB

Question

I've experience with Toplink to translate objects to database and vica versa. But this was all part of a JSP site and now I did some EJB stuff with it to. Now is my question: is it good to work with stuff like Toplink in a Java Desktop application or is it more common to use native sql stuff from Java?

Maybe some experience of prof. developpers might be good. I need to develop a seriously application for a client. I'm doing it in Java and I'm gonna store the data in a database.

Thanks

Answer 1

ORM is nice if your data model is well structured, not overly complex and, most of all, if you have control over it.

Legacy databases or poorly modelled ones are harder to be represented with ORM, and doing so would be strongly discouraged, as your application would add further complexities over those implied by the model itself.

If you are comfortable with some ORM tool such as Hibernate and your database is fairly well done, go for it. They sure save you a lot of boilerplate code and have some nice query optimization code under the hood. Otherwise, you may want to use JDBC directly or some other framework to simplify JDBC use but still using plain SQL. For such situations I recommend MyBatis .

Answer 2

TopLink (and EclipseLink/JPA) work just as well in a desktop application as in a server side application. In fact TopLink has been around since the 90s with client-server Smalltalk apps before the server side was popular.

Answer 3

It's dependent on your use cases

ORM technologies can nicely abstract away database specifics and allow you to concentrate of the domain model. However, there are circumstances where using an ORM layer is not appropriate (extremely large data sets can cause performance issues for example, database schemas that are difficult to map to objects is another).

I would recommend using a JPA compliant technology such as Hibernate. That way you're using the ORM that implements a Java standard and you can more or less swap in and out implementations.

For everything else then JDBC is a flexible friend

Answer 4

depends on database volume too. For databases with huge data try using hibernate. It might be of great help rather than writing JDBC code