Documentation: Introduction

Introduction

Metastores (aka "mts") is a framework for developing Java applications.

Like most frameworks, it provides a set of pluggable components designed to empower developers, unlike many other framewords it tries to maintain a clear separation of concerns between the various layers
It can be used for quick prototyping, by providing a huge amount of code and deployment information using sane defaults.
It can also be used in a full blown application by specifically binding to the parts of the framework that are needed, and only those.
It allows for generic aspects of the code to be specified just once and be re-used by many different layers whilst still preserving the separation of those layers.
It helps in simplifying deployment management by removing the need for multiple redundant configuration files. An emphasis on a sane default behaviour eliminates the need for configuration files in the majority of cases.
It lowers the level of skills required for using some more advanced standards and techniques.
It's layered Object Oriented design allows developers to have full control on how much (or how little) of the framework they use.
All these capabilities are both extensible and overridable: each feature can be customized, enhanced or even replaced to allow for a development configuration which can choose to implement critical sections of logic first.
Finally, it is open-source and licensed under the GPL version 2 allowing users to view, modify and redistribute the code in accordance with the license.

Automatic Persistence

The most stable feature is the database persistence engine.
Why yet another persistence implementation when there are already so many implementations like JDO or EJB CMP (part of J2EE) ? (see EJB 2.0 CMP and JDO FAQ for more details on EJB vs JDO), or any of the widely used open-source solutions (hibernate, derby, torque, etc).
The problem with these frameworks is that most implementations of these standards require some deployment configuration or/and some knowledge of how to configure and deploy them in order to be able to achieve even basic object persistence. Although these technologies are proven to be reliable and scalable, they are not the easiest to use for quick deployment or prototyping.

mts provides simple, configuration free, object persistence with full (and automatic) object level transaction support.
It can be used to generate a database schema for Java objects, including full integrity and referential constraints in minutes.

Control

Using a pluggable meta-information source mechanism, metastores allows developers to specify aspects of their business objects that will be re-used throughout their code - automatically if needed, this meta data can be defined using any combination of: annotations (a new feature in Java 1.5), XML files, properties files, environment, or custom methods.
It also provides a way of easily defining global defaults per field, class, package, etc.