Abra Project - Light weight Java persistence framework
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Brief History and Introduction

Abra is a Java library and a set of tools that can be used for storing and retrieving Java object in a relational database. We developed Abra while working at a Wall Street startup from summer of 2000 until spring of 2001. Unfortunately the startup went bust in the summer of 2001 (the investors got cold feet).

Fortunately we were allowed to release Abra as open source package under the BSD style license, as this package had nothing to do with core bussiness of the aforementioned startup.

Abra grew out as a solution to the problem of persisting Java objects in a relational database. Very early on we realized that we needed a simple persistence layer and that we did not want to hand write any SQL.

We looked at several packages (eg. Castor, TopLink, CocoBase), but none seemed to fit our purpose and given immense scheduling pressure we decided to grow the persistence layer ourselves, as we went along building the system.

Major Design Decisions

We were greatly inspired by several excellent articles on persistence layer design by Scott Ambler (see links below). We adapted several of his design suggestions with excellent results. We also wanted to keep things simple and to be able automatically generate all the tedious code (like the SQL/JDBC calls etc).

Main Features

Extra Features

In the Works

Documentation

Here is the current Javadoc and the User Manual Plus a how-to using a simple user example.

Mailing list

There is a mailing list for discussions of Abra here. If possible, please post questions to the list.

Links

Comments

Please send comments to richieb@netlabs.net or pmbethe@yahoo.com.
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