News

Making object-to-relational maps happen

• By Rich Seeley
• May 5, 2003

The table views of the relational world and the object views of Java programming often clash as developers seek to build working systems. A variety of relational-to-object mapping tools have arisen to address this issue, and CocoBase Enterprise O/R from Thought Inc. has gained a place in this grouping.

Thought Inc. recently announced the release of its CocoBase Enterprise O/R Version 4.5, service release 2, an object-to-relational mapping tool with support for Oracle9iAS and SunONE 7.

With added integration to the latest versions of the Oracle and Sun Microsystems servers, the new release continues to provide developers and database administrators with tools for building and maintaining database applications without extensive hand-coding, according to Daniel Wilson, Thought Inc.'s vice president of sales and marketing.

Developers using the new release do not need to hand-code CMP and BMP Entity Beans to deploy on Oracle9iAS and SunONE 7, said Wilson; the beans can be generated in full from editable templates.

For maintenance, CocoBase offers significant productivity gains and cost savings, Wilson said. He pointed to an example in which tables for an address may be changed in the database, thereby requiring changes to the application; this can raise maintenance costs if developers have to come in and re-code by hand.

"If you have to hand-code all the JDBC and SQL plus the operations that go into that, as well as the associations, that's very costly," Wilson said. "So what we do is separate it out by having an abstract layer. You can actually change the underlying map, which is really a dynamic object, without having to recompile or regenerate your application. So your DBAs can actually do [the changes] and your developers don't have to get involved."

While CocoBase came on the market in the midst of the 1990s technology boom, Wilson said his company has relied on customer sales rather than the new economy theory of that go-go decade.

"We've been shipping this thing for eight years and we're backed only by customers," he said. "We're not backed by venture [capital], so [CocoBase] has to work."

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