Friday, March 4, 2011

This is not your grandma's iBatis...is MyBatis!

I am currently starting a new project with one of my client. The previous team created their own ORM (ugh). I've noticed that they were not closing any SQL connections which is causing performance issues. Clearly, I need to refactor the ORM class. I wave several options:
For big starting projects (big green projects), I usually prefer Hibernate. Even though it is heavy and resource intensive, once you set it up, it is easy to use and maintain. It is also a very mature ORM. I usually choose this tool for major re-factoring and if the project has a lot of domain object and non-complex SQL queries. For small projects, I usually prefer MyBatis (previously named iBatis). It is light and if the company has complex SQL you can just map the SQL to objects via "mappers".

This particular project, it does not have any domains and have some complex queries, so I decided to use it. However, when I went to the site, I noticed that they have moved the code and not only they changed the name (it is now mybatis instead of iBatis) but that the API completely changed. I also learned that the connection template for Spring changed. Nevertheless, I still thought that Hibernate was going to be an overkill, so I decided to give MyBatis a shot. Here is some of the the stuff I learned about the new API and its connection with Spring. The following is my software stack for this project:
  • Java 1.6
  • Spring 3.0
  • mybatis 3.0
  • mybatis-spring 1.
I will show the following on this post:
  1. Configuration and Mappers
  2. Connection via Spring
  3. Testing using spring
  4. Log4J configuration
Configuration and Mappers
Nothing much has change here with the exception of the XML headers. The aliases and the mappers do behave the same. As you noticed, I do not include any of the parameters for the connection. This will be handle by Spring.



The domain that I will be using for the mapping is the following Destination class.


The mappers have some changes to it compared to the previous iBatis. In here, I used the constructor since my destination class is immutable. As always, the select point to the mapper so that what it fetches the record(s) it know how to map the POJO.


My repository layer is very simple. As you noticed, I'm using the Repository and Qualifier to be able to autowired it.

The database configuration is basically the same with the exception of the sqlSessionFactory. As you can see I have two properties: datasource and configLocation. The configLocation is where my config.xml file is located.

There is nothing that I need to do with the DAO/Repository context since it is using the component-scan:

My DAO test is the following: