Object-Oriented Thought Process, The, Second Edition

Using Object Persistence

Object persistence is another issue that must be addressed in many OO systems. Persistence is the concept of maintaining the state of an object. When you run a program, if you don't save the object in some manner, the object simply dies, never to be recovered. These transient objects might work in some applications, but in most business systems, the state of the object must be saved for later use. In his book The Object Primer, Scott Ambler devotes an entire section to this topic.

Object Persistence

Although the topic of object persistence and the topics in the next section might not be considered true design guidelines, I believe that they must be addressed when designing classes. Thus, I introduced them here to stress ...