Towards a Layered Architectural Design of a Persistence Framework

Persistence middleware enabling objects to be persistent in persistence mechanisms have emerged in this rapidly evolving software market. However, problems prevail in terms of non-uniformity for programmers in making use of functions of the persistence service interface provided by these middleware in their programs for object persistence in a target persistent store. This stems from the issue of coupling between the domain objects and underlying details of persistence mechanisms in the source code of programs which suffers in terms of seamless mapping, or the need to introduce an additional view for programmers to specify their domain objects in order to simulate transparent persistence. This paper intends to discuss pertinent issues in persistence framework development focusing on the architectural design of Extolware, a persistence framework prototype developed within our research program, to achieve the objective of seamlessness and uniformity of persistence service interface besides providing a single object-oriented view to programmers.