CBE Examples on GitHub

Cayenne by Example

Illustrating some of the major features of the Apache Cayenne ORM framework using simple examples.

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Differences with Hibernate

Stubbing out -- needs more details.

No LIE

If an object that has a lazily loaded relationship calls that relationship, Hibernate requires the DB session to be open. If the session is not open, Hibernate will throw a Lazy Initialization Exception. The Hibernate community is not in agreement on how to handle a Lazy Loading. The two main camps are to either keep the transaction open until all after the relationship in question is loaded, or write a custom getter for the lazy loaded relationship at the DAO level. Keeping the session open forces the the view layer to deal with data access, defeating the purpose of a segregated data access layer. Loading the relationships with DAO methods is cumbersome and hard to maintain.

Cayenne lazily loads all relationships by default. When a lazily loaded relationship is fetched and there is no database session, Cayenne opens a new session and preforms the query. Prefetching is available for cases in which eager loading is desirable. Cayenne keeps the segregation of the data access and view because the super-class of object that is being asked for the relationship handles the data interaction, similar to the custom getter case in Hibernate, without the need for extra methods/maintenance.

No TOE

Cayenne doesn't have a TransientObjectException.

No proxies

Cayenne doesn't create proxies.

No need for Spring to do Transaction Management

Cayenne's contexts (DataContext, ObjectContext, etc) provide transaction management.

No need for DAOs

In Hibernate, it is common to create DAOs (Data Access Objects) to insert/update/delete objects. This pattern doesn't fit well with Cayenne's context management.

POJO vs OO

Hibernate uses the POJO (Plain Old Java Object) approach while Cayenne uses OO (Object-Oriented classes).

Cayenne Modeler

Cayenne includes a GUI database modeler as part of the standard distribution, which is actively used and maintained by the framework developers. This GUI makes it much easier for developers to get up-to-speed modeling the database/Java layers.