Another challenge that presented us in developing our current product was persistence. Upon the recommendation of our architect, we chose Hibernate. Hibernate is a great tool for persisting model objects to nearly any data source you could imagine. The base implementation with our Data Access Objects (DAO’s) was straight forward.

We didn’t want to create an overly large schema for storing objects so when we started getting into subclasses we looked for a solution to handle subclasses and store them in the same table as the superclass. Luckily Hibernate can handle this as well. The only downside to our approach was that we ended up with a table that has columns for all the properties of each subclass with not-null set to false. This means your data integrity will have to reside in your manager objects.

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