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Prevayler: Java Object Persistence

IBM dW: An introduction to object prevalence - “Persisting state and data has always been a problem with object-oriented software. Over the years, developers have stored object data in many ways, including relational databases, flat files,and XML. None of these approaches really managed to keep the software purely object-oriented. The Prevayler team is changing this with the object prevalence concept. This article introduces object prevalence.”

Good article. I especially liked the code, though it has all the extra words that is necessary with Java.

The article has an architecture diagram that nails my confusion on why all these hype about Java server side programming.

You have compiled servlets, then JSP for presentation. Any HTML-embedded coding technique (JSP, ASP, PHP, DTML, CFML) is not exactly separating logic from presentation. Zope Page Templates is as close as you can get to content-logic separation at the moment. Coming back to using Java on the server side, I can’t quite convince myself that this is not overly complicated for most of the things that can be done using a browser as the front end. This might make sense for software development shops, but not for companies that are not in software development. With any kind of compilation involved, software configuration management becomes a must - how many non-software businesses take that seriously?

It certainly makes sense for big enterprises where they can have enterprise objects that may be accessed through JSP for web, through real-time GUI at it other times. May be if you’ve 50 or more programmers with good system architects, this is ok.

I’m happy using Python with pickling for my object persistence! If my requirements become complicated, I can always use ZODB.

1. With JSP, you don't have to embed code in HTML - you can (and should) use tag libraries. See http://www.brunningonline.net/simon/blog/archives/000357.html .

   Posted by: Simon Brunning on September 4, 2002 03:24 AM