An extensible mechanism for Long-Term Persistence of JavaBeans components

Abstract

Long Term Persistence for JavaBeans (LTP) is an API that supports a general mechanism for serializing JavaBeans into an XML-based text format and vice versa. As Java programming language does not currently support orthogonal persistence, a programmer can choose to convert the internal state of an application into a permanent storage and vice versa using the LTP API. In this paper, we propose a mechanism that is extensible and optional for LTP, without modifying the LTP specification, to maximize the flexibility and extendibility of Java applications. Our approach embeds scripts in an encoded XML text in order to reconstruct missing objects, or to create some additional helper objects during the subsequent decoding process. Moreover, as the decoding process may take too much time to instantiate certain heavyweight objects, the proposed mechanism also supports an optional cache pool to speed it up.