Easy way to store and retrieve objects in Java without using a relational DB?
Do you know of an "easy" way to store and retrieve objects in Java without using a relational DB / ORM like Hibernate?
[Note that I am not considering serialization as-is for this purpose, as it won't allow to retrieve arbitrary objects in the middle of an object graph. Neither am I considering DB4O because of its restrictive license. Thanks.]
"Easy" meaning: not having to handle low-level details such as key/value pairs to rebuild an object graph (as with BerkeleyDB or traditional caches). The same applies for rebuilding objects from a document- or column-oriented DB (CouchDB, HBase, ..., even Lucene).
Perhaps there are interesting projects out there that provide a layer of integration between the mentioned storage systems and the object model (like ORM would be for RDBMSs) that I am not aware of.
Anyone successfully using those in production, or experimenting with persistence strategies other than relational DBs? How about RDF stores?
Update: I came across a very interesting article: A list of distributed key-value stores
Answer
- Object Serialization (aka storing things to a file)
- Hibernate (uses a relational database but it is fairly transparent to the developer)
I would suggest Hibernate because it will deal with most of the ugly details that bog developers down when using a database while still allowing for the optimizations that have been made to database software over the years.