Persistence
When you create an object, it exists for as long as you need it, but under no circumstances does it exist when the program terminates. While this makes sense at first, there are situations in which it would be incredibly useful if an object could exist and hold its information even while the program wasn’t running. Then the next time you started the program, the object would be there and it would have the same information it had the previous time the program was running. Of course, you can get a similar effect by writing the information to a file or to a database, but in the spirit of making everything an object, it would be quite convenient to be able to declare an object persistent and have all the details taken care of for you.
Java provides support for “lightweight persistence,” which means that you can easily store objects on disk and later retrieve them. The reason it’s “lightweight” is that you’re still forced to make explicit calls to do the storage and retrieval. Lightweight persistence can be implemented both through object serialization (shown in Chapter 12) and Java Data Objects (JDO, shown in Thinking in Enterprise Java).
