For developing simple client-server applications, development environments such as VisualAge provide a visual language for generating the mappings of GUIs to database values and domain objects. For complex applications, tools such as TOPLink are very useful for simplifying the creation of persistent objects while hiding their implementation details. Quite often, application development requires tools for persistence that fall in between these two extremes. Just using the facilities provided by JDBC is not sufficient to work with objects. JDBC forces developers to work at the SQL level with rows and columns. Application developers do not want or need to write SQL statements to read or store their objects; they are busy solving the domain problem. This tutorial will describe how to make business objects persistent by mapping them to a relational database with minimal effort. It will also examine the patterns used to map domain-objects to a relational database. Participants of this tutorial will learn a set of patterns and a language-independent object model that can be used for mapping business objects to a relational database. They will also learn how to develop a data access layer along with the design patterns used in the database tools provided by VisualAge and TOPLink. Attendee Background: Basic knowledge of object concepts is required. A general understanding of relational databases and/or SQL is required. An understanding of patterns can be useful, but it is not required. The examples will be in Java so understanding the basics of Java is also desirable, but not necessary to understand the object-model. Presenter: Joseph W. Yoder has worked on the architecture, design, and implementation of various software projects dating back to 1985. These projects have incorporated many technologies and range from stand-alone to client-server applications, multi-tiered, databases, object-oriented, frameworks, human-computer interaction, collaborative environments, and domain-specific visual languages. Recently he has taught object-oriented concepts including Patterns and Smalltalk to Caterpillar and the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) analysts and developers, and has mentored many developers on the applications being deployed across the state of Illinois, such as the Newborn Screening application, the Refugee System, and the Food Drug and Dairy application. He is also coordinating these development efforts as the primary architect of the reusable frameworks being developed and used for these applications. Joe is the author of over two dozen published patterns and has been working with patterns for a long time, writing his first pattern paper in 1995, and chairing the PLoP‘97 conference on software patterns.

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