Purpose of toplink

Question

What is the purpose of toplink?
Kindly explain me
Thanks,
Ervan.

Answer 1

Hi Ervan,
TopLink is a modeling and code generation tool that connects to your database and reads its schema, then lets you map objects to database tables and views, specify single-row insert, update, load, and delete operations, queries and stored procedure calls, as methods to these objects. And, it also lets you define one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many relationships between objects based on relationships between tables in the database. It then generates fully working persistence objects code for you.
There are many other features that TopLink provides but I'm keeping my description brief so I can talk more about the benefits.
ORM Cuts down your development time
A typical application with 15-20 database tables has 30-50 objects (including domain and factory objects) and this is roughly 5000 to 10,000 lines of code. It is likely to take you a few weeks to a couple of months to develop and test this code. And, if your application has more tables than this (which many do), then just multiple the above numbers by that much.
On the other hand, an TopLink would generate this code very fast and easier. Even here, you need these 1-2 days primarily to determine your object mappings to the database. The actual code generation is instantaneous. So, your time saving is tremendous.
TopLink Tool Produces better designed code*
The code that you'll generate from an ORM is very likely going to be better designed than code designed by your own development team.
In brief the Model to Database interaction completelym will be handled by TopLink
Regards,
Vinay