Objectwiz - User's manual
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Preface

Introduction

The object paradigm is widely used for developping software applications. One of the reasons for its popularity is that it's great for mapping real-world concepts into data models. A classic architecture for a software application that use this paradigm is the Three-tier architecture (separation of the application in three layers: data, logic and presentation).

The task of the data layer is to provide an abstraction for storing objects into databases, for making them persistent. In many programming languages, this type of layer has been normalized in what is usually called a persistence layer. Let's mention JPA as an example. Those framework may rely on relational databases (in that case they are called Object-relational frameworks - ORM), object-oriented databases or any other system. Their job is to make sure that the data is stored, can be retrieved, queried and modified.

Objectwiz is a dynamic front-end for administrating such applications. It is possible to browse interactively the graph of objects and to manipulate data (CRUD operations, call to methods from the logic layer, etc.) directly from within the graph. Objectwiz stands between a database administration tool (such as phpMyAdmin) and a CRUD application generated from a data model.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

1. Objectwiz is very generic in its design and the concepts are independent of any programming language, still it can currently only be connected to JEE enterprise applications. The reason is simple: Java offers a wide range of standards (JPA, EJBs, JNDI, JMX, etc.) that greatly simplify the task of discovering the data model, retrieving the connection to the database, etc. If you are interested in connecting Objectwiz to applications from other programming languages, please get in touch with the development team.

2. Despite all these standards, some operations performed by Objectwiz are tied to the application server and the persistence provider that is used in the target application. Therefore Objectwiz needs a few lines of code for each server and persistence provider. Currently, only JBoss and Hibernate are supported, but with little effort Objectwiz could be connected to other JEE application servers or JPA-compliant providers as well. Please open a discussion on the forums about the particular server and/or provider that you are targetting if you would like it to get supported.

If you are new to object-oriented programming, Java or to the concept of persistence, enterprise beans, you might also consider to read the following articles: