PersistF: A Transparent Persistence Framework with Architecture Applying Design Patterns.

Persistence is the term used in computer science to describe a capability to store data structures in non-volatile storage such as a file system or a relational database (Wikipedia, 2003). There is a growing need to simplify the interactions among separate systems and to build complex software systems that are made out of components with well-defined services. At the base-level of such complex systems lies a persistence framework -- a set of classes tailored to save, retrieve, update and delete objects to and from their persistence stores, such as databases and flat files. This paper presents the design, and implementation of the transparent persistence framework called PersistF. Design patterns (Gamma, Helm, Johnson, & Vlissides, 1995) have been widely accepted in the software engineering community as the recommended approach to developing software. Part of the research effort of this work included the application of well-known design patterns in order to build the framework. We present how consistent application of design patterns allowed us to build a fully working persistence framework. In order to support development of modern complex applications, some recent application development environments for different programming languages are built in with some kind of persistence framework. To use these frameworks in target applications, the developer often must go through a steep learning curve as each framework is specific in some way, but namely in respect of configuring the framework's runtime engine with enough information about the domain application. This configuration is often time consuming and error prone. Most of the existing frameworks require complicated configuration steps that are imposed onto the developer. Our aim with this work was to present a framework that will not require such complicated configuration steps and would provide its service to the target application with virtually no configuration of the framework's handling of domain classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]