The Definitive Guide to db4o

Jim Paterson · Stefan Edlich

Nov 2006 · Apress

About this ebook

Sometimes we make things more difficult for ourselves than they really need to be. Programmers are no exception to this. For example, those of us of an object-oriented persuasion devote time and expertise to creating a model of a problem domain in terms of objects. We produce solutions that model real-world objects and that are highly extensible and reusable. And then we decide that we need those objects to stick around after the program stops, so we go ahead and create another, totally different model, just so that we can use a database. Our carefully designed objects are then chopped and squeezed to fit this new data model. In fact, most developers would argue that object persistence is a fundamental problem that has yet to be adequately solved. While there are frameworks that hide some of the details of the mismatch between object and data models from the programmer, none of them convi- ingly make what should be a simple job really simple. We held the same opinion, until we found out about db4o. db4o—the database for objects—simply stores native objects. “Native” means that these are the objects that your C# or Java program creates, stored exactly as they are. There’s no need to create a database schema, no need to map objects to tables, no need to do anything really, except store objects.

About the author

Jim Paterson is a lecturer in computing at Glasgow Caledonian University in the U.K. He specializes in web development and object-oriented software, and has a particular interest in using new tools in a teaching context. He has a Ph.D. in physics from Glasgow University, and worked previously as a research physicist and as a software engineer.