The JSR 220 specification defines Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0. One of its primary goals is to simplify the creation, management, and storage of entity beans. Working towards that goal, Sun Microsystems and supporting community developers created a new application programming interface (API) that lets you use "plain old Java objects" or POJOs as your persistable entities. The Java Persistence API facilitates your use of POJOs as entity beans and significantly reduces the need for complicated deployment descriptors and extra helper beans. Additionally, you can even use the API in desktop applications.

In this Mastering Grails installment, Scott Davis explores the various ways that Grails can use database tables that don't conform to the Grails naming standard. If you have Java™ classes that already map to your legacy databases, Grails allows you to use them unchanged. You'll see examples that use Hibernate HBM files and Enterprise JavaBeans 3 annotations with legacy Java classes.

While language-oriented toolsets become more advanced the range of development and deployment tools for databases remains primitive. How often is the DBA left sitting in the corner? Are you scared to change your database because other applications are using it? Do you have difficulty rolling out incremental changes to your databases? Does your database prevent you from releasing your software more frequently? Using real-world experiences - and the principles outlined in Ambler and Sadalage’s Refactoring Databases, this paper aims to demonstrate how to take control of the database and make it possible to incrementally evolve and improve its design. With these techniques the database need no longer be the bottleneck in your develop-test-deploy process. This paper features ideas on how to best use open source tools including Ant, CruiseControl and dbdeploy.

Database Message Exchange Service allows messages to be stored in database in order to be picked up by a Windows service and delivered to external services and vice versa. A message can be anything – an order, some task, a message for a destination message queue, a payload for calling external webservice and so on. It decouples the client from the external services that are not in the same network or not always available or do not support high frequency poll needed by front-ends.

Database technology is a fast-moving field filled with innovations. This article describes the current state of the field and discusses the four rules for data success.

Oracle technologists explain the cloud computing implementation as it relates to database as a service (DBaaS). Cloud computing encompasses the IT infrastructure resources, which include networks, storage, servers, applications, and services. DBaaS is a subset of the overall cloud concept, specifically focused on the last two resources, applications and services.

This article presents Cayenne - a fast, scalable and easy-to-learn open source Object Relational Mapping (ORM) framework. Cayenne is a rare kind of a Java open source project. It is not just an "edit your own XML" runtime library, but an integrated suite that includes modeling and deployment tools. This article shows how to quickly create an ORM application with Cayenne and discusses its core features and design principles.

The Persevere persistent object framework brings persistent object mapping to the browser JavaScript environment. Object persistence has seen great popularity in the Java™ programming and Ruby worlds, and the dynamic JavaScript language is naturally well suited to mapping objects to persisted data. Persevere automates mapping and communication in Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax)-based Web applications in addition to simplifying much of the development challenge by providing a manageable data model, transparent client-server Ajax interchanges, automatic state change storage, and implicit transaction management.

The objective of this paper is to present the Whitemarsh approach to the definition of function points within database-centric business information systems, the process of counting function points, and the use of two metrics derived from function point counts to accomplish business information system estimating.

Optional XML elements—for example, online forms—are special in that they might or might not appear in XML files. Representing such optional elements is a challenge both in programming languages and in databases. In many cases, null values are inserted in databases to represent empty optional elements, but null database XML values can be difficult to retrieve. Discover alternative, less-invasive approaches to handling optional XML elements without the need for data overloading or inserting null or other sentinel values.