Do we need components for persistent data storage in the java 2 enterprise environment?

Abstract

Object-oriented applications that use the Java 2 Enterprise Environment (J2EE) and operate on any kind of data storage have to integrate access to persistent data, which is usually achieved by entity beans. However, the use of entity beans as components for persistent data storage has a number of drawbacks. Component level inheritance and dynamic querying are not supported appropriately, and the whole approach seems to be overweight. In order to overcome these weaknesses, we implemented a JCA1-compliant resource adapter, which allows the use of Java Data Objects (JDO) instead of entity beans and introduces a lightweight, easy to use and powerful transparent persistence layer for the Java 2 Enterprise Environment. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.