Java Data Objects

Enhancement Approaches

You may not be familiar with class enhancement, but it is not JDO-specific and it has been applied in other software technologies. There are several approaches that can be used to enhance a class. Enhancement can be performed by:

• Implementing enhancement yourself manually

• Using a source-code enhancer

• Using a byte-code enhancer

Each enhancement approach requires access to the JDO metadata you have defined.

You may explicitly declare that your class implements PersistenceCapable. In this case, you need to implement the PersistenceCapable contract fully, as specified by the JDO specification. An enhancer ignores a class if you have explicitly declared that it implements PersistenceCapable . We do not recommend this approach; it is tedious and error-prone.

A source-code enhancer reads your original source code and adds the source necessary to support the JDO enhancement contract. The revised source is compiled and is then ready for execution in a JDO environment. At the time this book was written, only one vendor supported a source-code enhancer; the vender also supported a byte-code enhancer.

The most common approach for enhancing a class is to use a JDO byte-code enhancer. It reads a class file produced by the Java compiler and generates a new class file that has been enhanced. With a byte-code enhancer, you can make classes persistent even if you do not have the source code. Figure 6-1 illustrates the process of using a byte-code enhancer to enhance the Movie class. ...