Generation of POJOs and DAOs Classes from Metadata Database

Implementing the persistence layer is a task that the Object Relational Mapping (ORMs) tools have standardized through diverse frameworks and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). However, these ORMs and APIs have some inconveniences related to their configuration process and the time and effort it takes to learn them, amongst others. For example, every time a database is used, a configuration process is realized to map the database to obtain Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs) and Data Access Objects (DAOs). In order to overcome those disadvantages, this work contributes by proposing a reusable and extensible process that supports the automatic generation of POJOs and DAOs from database scheme metadata, through the specification of an Extended Backus–Naur Form (EBNF) grammar. A tool named GenPOJO was developed in order to test the process. Unlike the existing ORMs, the proposed process does not require the configuration steps for each database. In addition, GenPOJO does not require time to learn since the only input it receives is a file in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) format containing the database scheme metadata.