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Author : Kyle Brown, Gary Craig, Greg Hester, David Pitt, Russell Stinehour, Mark Weitzel, Jim Amsden, Peter M. Jakab, Daniel Berg
Publisher : IBM Press
Category : J2EE
Review by : Jeanne Boyarsky
Rating : 8 horseshoes
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"Persistence in the Enterprise" helps architects pick the right persistence technology for JEE applications. The books is written from a "we the IBM consultants" point of view. I liked this as it made the five author book more consistent.
The persistence technologies evaluated are
JDBC, iBatis, Hibernate Core (not the JPA implementation), Apache Open JPA and IBM's Pure Query. The last one seemed like plugging IBM tools, but the others were really good. Similarly Open JPA was chosen to represent JPA since it used by WebSphere (and WebLogic for that matter.) This was fine because the ideas apply to all JPA implementations.
The stated goals of the book are to provide "an end to end view of choosing a persistence technology" and "help clients exploit the WebSphere product suite." These dual goals worked well for them. Luckily, the first goal dominates. The authors go into a lot of detail describing the criteria used for evaluating and comparing.
The book did spend some time describing basic database concepts that I'd like to think an architect already knows. Starting with the criteria in chapter four, things got excellent. The following five chapters describe each persistence technology with sample code implementing CRUD. It's not meant to teach the language - just to show what a solution consists of. They also include literature references, ORM features and tuning options.
The last chapter includes five pages of tables to easily compare technologies along with what each technology is best for. Overall, this book is a good value if you are choosing a persistence technology. It saves countless hours of time in research and analysis.
[ October 06, 2008: Message edited by: Lasse Koskela ]