Longevity is Like Hibernate … Except that it’s Not

Longevity is like Hibernate, except that it’s not. The two projects share one major goal: provide persistence support for your domain entities in your enterprise application. But they are more different than same.

While Hibernate is for Java and relational databases, Longevity is for Scala and document databases. Hibernate is also an Object-Relational Mapper (ORM), and longevity is not. Let’s break that down.

The “object” in ORM is the domain entity instances in an Object-Oriented programming language, such as Java. In Scala, our entity instances are still objects, but they are immutable objects. In OO, objects are mutable by default. So the “O” in ORM is talking about mutable objects. Indeed, in Hibernate, you cannot create an entity with immutable set or list properties. In contrast, in a Functional/OO hybrid such as Scala, we always prefer to use immutable objects, because of the elegance of programming with them in a functional style.

The “relational” in ORM is the relational database the domain objects are stored in. We are thinking in Entity-Relationship modeling here, where the domain is a loosely structured graph of related entities. In DDD, we focus on a higher structure of the entities and relationships in our model by composing them into larger units called aggregates. And document databases do the same thing, except there, we call them documents.

The “mapper” in ORM is about mapping in between the two different worlds of “O” and “R”: from rows in a relational database, into OO objects, and back again. Hibernate gives you tremendous power to customize your database schema by enscripting the specifics of your physical model into annotations on your entity classes. Longevity takes an alternate approach, encouraging you to design your domain classes freely, trusting that the translation in and out of the database will work out well. After all, documents and aggregates are a great match for each other.

Longevity encapsulates persistence concerns behind a persistence API that is elegant and powerful. Your domain classes remain persistence-free, so that you can use them easily throughout your application. Functional techniques such as higher ordered functions allow us to abstract persistence concerns in a way where it is still convenient to perform operations on the entities themselves, similar to the way futures encapsulate an asynchronous process.