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Oracle TopLink Developer's Guide
10g Release 3 (10.1.3) B13593-01 |
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Oracle TopLink Developer's Guide
10g Release 3 (10.1.3) B13593-01 |
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To ensure the best design for your TopLink application, Oracle recommends that you follow an iterative step-by-step development process. The flexibility of TopLink lets you use any development tool.
This section describes following recommended development process:
This section describes the general development stages of a TopLink application. Figure 2-1 illustrates the TopLink development process.
Design the Application (1)
Define your application requirements, select an architecture, and determine the target platform. See "Designing Your Application With TopLink" for more information. Remember, TopLink works with any architecture and any platform.
When designing the application, you should also create an object model for the application. See "Understanding Object Persistence" for more information. It is important to create the object model before using TopLink to map objects, because defining persistent mappings for an incorrect or rapidly changing model can be very difficult.
Develop the Application (2, 3, 4)
Create the Java classes and decide how the classes should be implemented by the data source. When working with a legacy system, decide how the classes relate to the existing data. If there is no legacy data source to integrate, decide how to store each class in the data source and create the required schema. Alternatively, you may use TopLink to create your initial tables.
Using TopLink Workbench, create descriptors and mappings for the persistent classes. Use TopLink sessions to manipulate the persistent classes, including querying and changing data. See Part II, "Using TopLink Development Tools" for more information.
Avoid building all your model's descriptors in a single iteration. Start with a small subset of your classes. Build and test their descriptors, then gradually add new descriptors and relationships. This lets you catch common problems before they proliferate through your entire design.
Write Java code to use database sessions. Sessions are used to query for database objects and write objects to the database. See Chapter 75, "Understanding TopLink Sessions" for more information.
Deploy the Application (5)
Generate, package, then deploy the necessary files to your application server. The required information will vary, depending on your environment and architecture. See Part III, "Deploying a TopLink Application" for more information.
Maintain the Application (6)
TopLink includes many options that can enhance application performance. You can customize most aspects of TopLink to suit your requirements. Use advanced TopLink features or write custom querying routines to access the database in specific ways, and to optimize performance. See Part IV, "Optimizing and Customizing a TopLink Application" for more information.
Oracle provides additional support for TopLink developers on the Oracle Technology Network (OTN), including the following:
You must register online before using OTN; registration is free of charge and can be done at:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/membership
If you already have a user name and password for OTN, then you can go directly to the documentation section of the OTN Web site at
http://www.oracle.com/technology/docs
Using your OTN user name and password, you can also access the TopLink developer's forum to post questions and get answers about using TopLink. See:
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/forum.jsp?forum=48
