Comparison and Performance Evaluation of Popular ORM Frameworks

Abstract

Most of the software applications use databases. Performance of data retrieval and manipulation from software application is a main concern for application developers, software engines and vendors. They are heavily interested in middle-ware tools and ORM frameworks. Thus the database connectivity technology play major role in integration and transferring data into databases. ORM framework identified as persistence layer in Java object oriented environment. More effort needs in persistence layer development than business feature development. Therefore its performance and optimization have become a popular topic. Main objective of this thesis is performance comparison and evaluation of popular ORM frameworks, after analysing popular ORM frameworks, three frameworks have been selected for Java EE / Java SE, namely Hibernate, EclipseLink and OpenJPA, which are emerging JPA compliant version. These frameworks named as candidates for comparison of JPA Providers. Domain model is constructed including object oriented concepts. Domain model is mapped to relational model with various pattern and techniques to avoid mismatch between object oriented model and relational model. The summary of objectives of this research is in Comparison Performance Criteria Matrices . Web application has developed with this domain model to accomplish the comparison and performance evaluation task. Candidates ORM Frameworks can be easily integrated to the web application architecture are an attractive feature of this web application. Finally evaluated these three ORM frameworks to find out which framework is the best or more appropriate. Comparison and performance results are shown that Hibernate and EclipseLink are in a similar rank but OpenJPA is bit of lower than the other two candidates.