Butterfly Persistence is a simple, no nonsense Java JDBC based persistence API. It aims to provide a simple relational persistence API. Its features include:
- Automatic/manual connection management
- Easier JDBC operations via JDBC templates
- Simple record-to-map reading for dynamic queries.
- Simple object relational mapping.
- Simple Auto-mapping of POJO classes and fields to database tables and columns
- Annotation based mappings of POJO classes to database tables and columns
- Programmatic mapping of POJO classes to database tables and columns
- Combination of the mapping methods above, so you can create semi-automatic mappings where you customize what cannot be automated.
- Auto-generation of SQL for inserts, updates and deletes
- Support for batch updates.
- Support for transactions.
It provides a simple and pragmatic approach to persistence and will either help you, or get out of the way and let you do the job manually.
Butterfly Persistence can auto-generate most SQL for simple CRUD operations. For advanced queries you simply write the SQL yourself.
Butterfly Persistence can auto-map database tables to your POJOs at runtime, so you don't have to write all that boring boilerplate code yourself. Butterfly Persistence uses Java Reflection and JDBC DatabaseMetadata to do that. You can, of course, modify the auto-mapping, or write your own, custom mapping.
Read more about Butterfly Persistence here:
http://tutorials.jenkov.com/butterfly-persistence/index.html
The first version of Butterfly Persistence was released in 2005 - before JPA was a standard, and before Hibernate had reached its dominant position it has today. Back then it made a lot of sense with a lightweight persistence API like Butterfly Persistence. The latest version of Butterfly Persistence was released in 2009.
Today you are probably better off going with something more "modern", more widely used and documented such as Hibernate / JPA.
I am mostly keeping the code online here, because some users have told me they still use Butterfly Persistence, and prefer it to other, more heavy weight alternatives.
I am currently working on getting Butterfly Persistence to build using Java 11 and Maven. This also requires upgrading JUnit to 5.4+ and finding my old test mock toolkit Butterfly Testing Tools too !
This should make it easier to use Butterfly Persistence with newer Java versions.
For some types of projects it can be easier to just write the SQL to get the data you want from the database, rather than having to write some Object Query Language syntax, and hope it translates into the SQL you need.
SQL can give you access to database specific features.
Most developers already know SQL - so they don't have to learn yet another query language.