Hibernate Alliances with JBoss – Seam in it’s JEE 5.0 Product Stack
As of now, we know hibernate as object relation mapping (ORM) open source framework. A framework, that eases our life in interaction with database, it not only supports many databases, but also provides a robust framework for connections and other complex data operations. It supports persistent data store interactions in both Java and .NET technologies in object oriented way.
As J2EE moved to JEE 5, it introduced ORM into it’s technology specification through Java Persistent API (JPA). This means, we have a specification that defines the rules of object relation mapping game. Implementation can be different – hibernate, iBatis and so on, but all need to adhere to this common specification so that the application server vendors will have something standard to deal with. When hibernate supported JPA implementation in recent release, it has broken the boundary of its operation area – data access. Now, it also has a product that can be used in middle and presentation tier. If you visit hibernate site , you can definitely see it appearing under JEE 5.0 technology stack. It is (JBoss) ‘Seam‘ – framework that would support enterprise application build and integration.
What does it offer? It offers something that any enterprise application would need. It provides ability of integrating many frameworks that we usually use in our applications at different tiers.
These are the services that Seam can offer.
- Integrate JSF with EJB 3.0
- Integrated AJAX
- Declarative State Management
- Bijection: Contextual, dynamic and bi-directional dependency injection
- Annotations
- jBPM integration for business process management
- Hibernate integration for database interaction
In short, we have something, that is going to make the competition fierce amongst Sun, Spring and Seam/hibernate to occupy open source application development space to maximum extend. The good thing about it is that this will avoid monopoly of anyone vendor and the competition may result in good evolution of this technology. Finally we would have many options to compare and choose.
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