The Entity Container - An Object-Oriented and Model-Driven Persistency Cache

Data persistency is a fundamental, but complex aspect of a modern software development process. Therefore, in order to reduce development costs and improve a system´s quality, support for data persistency must be provided to common software paradigms, such as object-oriented programming or component based development. In this paper we present a new approach of an object persistency cache - the Entity Container (EC), based on a data model. The EC allows data and metadata management according to a data model independent of any specific persistency mechanism. We present the complete architecture, functionality and implementation of the system and compare our new approach with existing frameworks in order to point out features and major improvements of the EC.