An Empirical Study on the Practice of Maintaining Object-Relational Mapping Code in Java Systems Tse-Hsun Chen Weiyi Shang Jinqiu Yang Queen’s University Concordia University University of Waterloo Ontario, Canada Quebec, Canada Ontario, Canada
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Ahmed E. Hassan Michael W. Godfrey Queen’s University University of Waterloo Ontario, Canada Ontario, Canada
[email protected] [email protected] Mohamed Nasser Parminder Flora BlackBerry BlackBerry Ontario, Canada Ontario, Canada ABSTRACT code. Future studies should carefully examine ORM code, Databases have become one of the most important compo- in particular given the rising use of ORM in modern software nents in modern software systems. For example, web ser- systems. vices, cloud computing systems, and online transaction pro- cessing systems all rely heavily on databases. To abstract 1. INTRODUCTION the complexity of accessing a database, developers make use Managing data consistency between source code and database of Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks. ORM is a difficult task, especially for complex large-scale systems. frameworks provide an abstraction layer between the appli- As more systems become heavily dependent on databases, it cation logic and the underlying database. Such abstraction is important to abstract the database accesses from devel- layer automatically maps objects in Object-Oriented Lan- opers. Hence, developers nowadays commonly make use of guages to database records, which significantly reduces the Object-Relation Mapping (ORM) frameworks to provide a amount of boilerplate code that needs to be written. conceptual abstraction between objects in Object-Oriented Despite the advantages of using ORM frameworks, we ob- Languages and data records in the underlying database.