Architecting Your Application with Spring, Hibernate, and Patterns

Throughout this book, we will demonstrate how Spring integrates with key persistence frameworks and strategies. Along the way, you will learn more about Spring’s features and capabilities, and some of the key design patterns it uses to get the job done effectively. Until several years ago, simple Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) was one of the most popular choices for implementing an application’s persistence tier. However, EJB and open source ORM frameworks such as Hibernate have significantly changed the persistence landscape, by allowing developers to focus on a Java-based domain model, maintaining the object-oriented semantics of Java while still working with the relational concepts of a SQL database. ORM offers a level of abstraction that affords increased flexibility by decoupling application code from the lower-level details of a relational database.