iBatis Tutorial

I've been playing around with Persistence frameworks lately, after been inspired by a Hibernate, which is a de facto standard is used in lot of places. While Hibernate is certainly an excellent technology, it is not always the right choice. In other words, Hibernate works very well if your data model is well in sync with object model, because ORM solutions like Hibernate map object to tables. However, let’s suppose data model is not in sync with object model, this is where the model starts breaking down. One size does not fit all. So this is where I like to use iBatis; as the alternative solution, iBatis maps results sets to objects, so no need to care about table structures. This works very well for stored procedures, works very well for reporting applications, etc,.You can find differences between iBatis & Hibernate  here.

iBatis Introduction

The first thing we need to know is:

What is iBatis ?

What isn’t iBATIS ?

Essentially, iBatis is a very lightweight persistence solution that gives you most of the semantics of an O/R Mapping toolkit, without all the drama. In other words ,iBATIS strives to ease the development of data-driven applications by abstracting the low-level details involved in database communication (loading a database driver, obtaining and managing connections, managing transaction semantics, etc.), as well as providing higher-level ORM capabilities (automated and configurable mapping of objects to SQL calls, data type conversion management, support for static queries as well as dynamic queries based upon an object's state, mapping of complex joins to complex object graphs, etc.). iBATIS simply maps JavaBeans to SQL statements using a very simple XML descriptor. Simplicity is the key advantage of iBATIS over other frameworks and object relational mapping tools.

Spring - iBATIS Configuration

HAVE YOUR SAY

At last a quick Ibatis tutorial that works.
Many thanks

Declanmagee, UK

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Installing iBATIS is a quick and simple process. Because it is a library, and not an application, there is no installation process, but you do need to go through a few steps to use iBATIS in your application. You need to get the iBATIS library files. The entire iBATIS framework can be downloaded from iBATIS homepage. iBATIS is delivered in a single JAR file: ibatis-version.build.jar (as of now, ibatis-2.3.0.677.jar) and should be copied and made available at runtime via the application's class path.

Configuring the Environment:

Let’s see how to configure the iBatis-Spring environment. When working with Spring and iBATIS, you will have a minimum of three XML configuration files, and you will often have even more. It is important that you become familiar with these config files. So how do you make iBATIS available to your application? There are a couple of ways:

Now that we know the basic configuration steps,let's jump into example.

Next » Spring - iBatis Integration Example