In Chapter 7, Accessing Database with Spring and JDBC Template Patterns, we saw that Spring provides JdbcTemplate class based on the GOF template method design pattern. This class handles all the required boilerplate codes underlying the tradition JDBC API. But when we work with the Spring JDBC module, mapping tables to the objects becomes very tedious. In this chapter, we saw the solution to map objects to tables in a relational database--we can do much more with a relational database by using ORM in a complex application. Spring supports integration with several ORM solutions like Hibernate, JPA, and others. These ORM Frameworks enable the declarative programming model for the data persistence instead of using the JDBC programming model.

We also looked at the several design patterns that are implemented in the data access layer or integration tier. These patterns are implemented as a feature in the Spring Framework as proxy pattern for lazy loading, Facade pattern for integration with business tier, DAO patterns for data accessing, and so on.

In the next chapter, we'll see how we can improve our application's performance in production by using Spring's support for cache patterns.