This project sets out to simplify the process of developing Java based database applications that can be used either locally or remotely across a network. The main aim is to design, implement and evaluate a set of classes to support easy access to a relational database. This is essentially a connection framework that sits on top of the JDBC API. In addition, a second framework was developed which provided object-relational mapping that added persistence to Java objects, by storing their attributes in a relational database. Both frameworks were utilised and tested by developing a prototype application that accessed a database and required support for object persistence.
The systems were designed using the object-oriented methodology, OMT (Rumbaugh et al., 1991), which was complimented by JSP (Culwin,1998), which was used to provide a more detailed design for within class coding. The system was then implemented using the Java Programming language. This Java approach has the potential to solve many of the problems facing application developers, requiring heterogeneous database access via an Intranet/Internet.