Integration Frameworks

In this chapter, we’ve demonstrated how to integrate and extend Hibernate in order to implement more advanced application features. We discussed some of the challenges with exposing RESTful web services on Hibernate-powered applications, and how to simplify a serialization or marshaling strategy. We examined Spring 3’s new MVC capabilities, as well as its OXM abstraction for providing object-to-XML marshaling.

We also discussed the DTO pattern, and how this strategy can reduce the complexities of serializing your domain model. However, translating a domain class to a DTO class (and back again) can be a source of defects and maintenance problems. One solution is to use a framework like Dozer. Dozer handles the mapping between two different classes, using convention over configuration and mapping configuration files. By abstracting these translation details to a specialized framework, the complexities inherent in a DTO mapping layer are significantly reduced.

Providing full-text search capability is a very important and common requirement for many applications. Lucene is an open source Java framework that offers powerful indexing and search capability, but can be difficult to integrate into an application without requiring significant glue code to sync changes to the domain model with the Lucene index. Hibernate Search is a framework that bridges the gap between these two excellent frameworks, enhancing key Hibernate framework classes to offer Lucene querying and indexing capabilities. Hibernate Search allows developers to execute Lucene queries within the realm of Hibernate, so that search results return standard Hibernate entities.

Spring and Hibernate are amazing open source frameworks. However, building upon the foundations of these tools is the key to successful application development. Learning best practices for integrating your persistence tier with other frameworks is as important as learning the persistence framework itself.