In his book "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture", Martin Fowler talks about persistence patterns which are commonly found in software development and particularly in relation to ORMs.
Is there a pattern that Hibernate adheres to most closely?
Hibernate make use of several patterns:
- Lazy load (proxing collections)
- Unit of Work (as part of Session object)
- probably Identity Map or something more sophisticated
- Mapping Metadata
- Query Object for Criterion API
- all object relational structual patterns
Hibernate does not follow ActiveRecord pattern. The pattern that Hibernate adheres most closely is the Datamapper pattern.
If you're looking for design patterns explicity, then you could consider Hibernate a fancy API for implementing the Active Record Pattern:
In software engineering, the active
record pattern is a design pattern
frequently found in software that
stores its data in relational
databases. It was named by Martin
Fowler in his book Patterns of
Enterprise Application Architecture.
The interface to such an object would
include functions such as Insert,
Update, and Delete, plus properties
that correspond more-or-less directly
to the columns in the underlying
database table.
Active record is an approach to
accessing data in a database. A
database table or view is wrapped into
a class; thus an object instance is
tied to a single row in the table.
After creation of an object, a new row
is added to the table upon save. Any
object loaded gets its information
from the database; when an object is
updated, the corresponding row in the
table is also updated. The wrapper
class implements accessor methods or
properties for each column in the
table or view.
Hibernate is obviously domain model. The objects in ORM are the domain model, so you can't do ORM without it.