Spring in Practice

Chapter 2. Data persistence, ORM, and transactions

This chapter covers

• Understanding Spring JDBC data-persistence templates
• Exploiting ORM using Hibernate and JPA
• Learning how transactions manage database concurrency

This chapter assembles the data persistence, ORM, DAO, and transaction-management infrastructure you’ll be using throughout the rest of the book. Although there are cases where it’s useful to work directly with JDBC, the ORM approach confers major benefits in terms of simplifying the codebase. Most of the persistence examples throughout the book are ORM-based—specifically Hibernate-based—and so a large part of what we’ll do here is explain not only how ORM fits into the scheme of things, but also how to perform common tasks ...