[Tech] Persistence Layer Generation

More than a year ago, I wrote a blog entry discussing Apache iBatis (my favorite "O/R" Mapping framework) and wrote mostly about the not so well known sub-project Abator. Today I realised that there was some significant updates on the iBatis project recently, and also a new Abator version, renamed to iBator as released.

iBator is a code-generation tool that makes kind of introspection into a relational database schema and with a supporting XML configuration generates basic iBatis SQLMaps, Java Classes, and DAO classes (Spring). iBator can be used by an Ant task, standalone command or Eclipse plugin. It seems that this subproject got more momentum recently and I hope for further updates soon.

So iBator allows to generate a significant part of the persistance code of an application, which also helps "iBatis rookies" in understanding how iBatis works. The problem of the original Abator was, that it did not allow roundtrip engineering: typically the code generation is only the first step in the development of a persistance layer. One will in many cases want to modify the generated DAOs to better fit the projects needs. It seems, that the recent iBator release allows a merging of new generated Java classes with changes made in the old ones by using the Eclipse plugin. However, I did not substantiate this feature as yet.

I believe, that iBator makes the already very easy and straightforward iBatis project even more accessible in providing good boilerplate code to start from, yet I would be curious about actual "roundtrip experiences"...