A Java geek

This review is about Spring Persistence with Hibernate by Ahmad Reza Seddighi from Packt Publishing.

Facts

1. 15 chapters, 441 pages, 38€99
2. This book is intended for beginners but more experienced developers can learn a thing or two
3. This book covers Hibernate and Spring in relation to persistence

Pros

1. The scope of this book is what makes it very interesting. Many books talk about Hibernate and many talk about Spring. Yet, I do not know of many which talk about the use of both in relation to persistence. Explaining Hibernate without describing the transactional side is pointless
2. The book is well detailed, taking you by the hand from the bottom to reach a good level of knowledge on the subject
3. It explains plain AOP, then Spring proxies before heading to the transactional stuff

Cons

1. The book is about Hibernate but I would have liked to see a more tight integration with JPA. It is only described as an another way to configure the mappings
2. Nowadays, I think Hibernate XML configuration is becoming obsolete. The book views XML as the main way of configuration, annotations being secondary
3. Some subjects are not documented: for some, that’s not too important (like Hibernate custom SQL operations), for others, that’s a real loss (like the @Transactional Spring annotation)

Conclusion

Despite some minor flaws, Spring Persistence with Hibernate let you go head first into the very complex sujbect of Hibernate. I think that Hibernate has a very low entry ticket, and you can be more productive with it very quickly. On the downside, mistakes will cost you much more than with old plain JDBC. This book serves you Hibernate and Spring concepts on a platter, so you will make less mistakes.

With new JEE 5 standard has come the EJB3 specifications. From an historical point of view, EJBs come into 3 different flavors: (i) Entity for persistence, (ii) Session for business logic and (iii) Message-Driven for listeners. Entity EJB are the most time-consuming to develop in their 2.1 version. Apart from the inherent complexity of EJB (local and remote interfaces, homes), developing an EJB 2 is error-prone because of the mapping mechanism. All in all, EJB 2 development really needs a very specialized IDE and expert developers. That’s the main reason why EJB 2 didn’t achieve a significant market share, and had to compete with JDO, Hibernate and other third-party frameworks.

Sun eventually realized this and did come with a much simpler solution with EJB 3. Using Java 5 annotations, developing Entity EJB 3 is a breeze. The part of EJB 3 specifications that deal with Entity is called Java Persistence API (JPA). It is a specification in its own right, and in the next specifications, it will have its own. Developing JPA applications is a two-step process. First, you have to create you model classes. Such classes will be the foundation of your persistence layer: it would be a good idea to use this layer throughout your entire organization, since these classes should closely map your database model. A simple JPA enhanced class would look like this: Read more…