Java – What are detached, persistent and transient objects in hibernate

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What are detached, persistent and transient objects in hibernate? Please explain with an example.

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A new instance of a persistent class which is not associated with a Session, has no representation in the database and no identifier value is considered transient by Hibernate:

Person person = new Person();
person.setName("Foobar");
// person is in a transient state

A persistent instance has a representation in the database, an identifier value and is associated with a Session. You can make a transient instance persistent by associating it with a Session:

Long id = (Long) session.save(person);
// person is now in a persistent state

Now, if we close the Hibernate Session, the persistent instance will become a detached instance: it isn't attached to a Session anymore (but can still be modified and reattached to a new Session later though).

All this is clearly explained in the whole Chapter 10. Working with objects of the Hibernate documentation that I'm only paraphrasing above. Definitely, a must-read.

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Java – reflection and why is it useful

The name reflection is used to describe code which is able to inspect other code in the same system (or itself).

For example, say you have an object of an unknown type in Java, and you would like to call a 'doSomething' method on it if one exists. Java's static typing system isn't really designed to support this unless the object conforms to a known interface, but using reflection, your code can look at the object and find out if it has a method called 'doSomething' and then call it if you want to.

So, to give you a code example of this in Java (imagine the object in question is foo) :

Method method = foo.getClass().getMethod("doSomething", null);
method.invoke(foo, null);

One very common use case in Java is the usage with annotations. JUnit 4, for example, will use reflection to look through your classes for methods tagged with the @Test annotation, and will then call them when running the unit test.

There are some good reflection examples to get you started at http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/reflect/index.html

And finally, yes, the concepts are pretty much similar in other statically typed languages which support reflection (like C#). In dynamically typed languages, the use case described above is less necessary (since the compiler will allow any method to be called on any object, failing at runtime if it does not exist), but the second case of looking for methods which are marked or work in a certain way is still common.

Update from a comment:

The ability to inspect the code in the system and see object types is not reflection, but rather Type Introspection. Reflection is then the ability to make modifications at runtime by making use of introspection. The distinction is necessary here as some languages support introspection, but do not support reflection. One such example is C++

Java – What are the differences between a HashMap and a Hashtable in Java

There are several differences between HashMap and Hashtable in Java:

Hashtable is synchronized, whereas HashMap is not. This makes HashMap better for non-threaded applications, as unsynchronized Objects typically perform better than synchronized ones.
Hashtable does not allow null keys or values. HashMap allows one null key and any number of null values.
One of HashMap's subclasses is LinkedHashMap, so in the event that you'd want predictable iteration order (which is insertion order by default), you could easily swap out the HashMap for a LinkedHashMap. This wouldn't be as easy if you were using Hashtable.

Since synchronization is not an issue for you, I'd recommend HashMap. If synchronization becomes an issue, you may also look at ConcurrentHashMap.

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Related Solutions

Java – reflection and why is it useful

Java – What are the differences between a HashMap and a Hashtable in Java

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