FreeFORM

FreeFORM is a release of FORM's documentation, product, and source code as an open source and free project. Currently we are still working on the release, but if you would like to be updated when FreeFORM (1.2) does come out (2nd quarter, 2000), just contact us and let us know.

FORM Description

FORM is a good object-relational mapping framework for Java. It supports high-quality object and relational models, integrates easily into large and small applications, and supports a good architecture for those applications. FORM provides sophisticated queries, caching, evolution isolation, database independence, and dynamic configuration.

FORM is designed especially for projects that want to have both a good object model and a good relational information model. It can use and support the features available in both worlds (e.g. inheritance, triggers, associations, reporting) and can couple the two worlds in standard or feature specific manners. For example, identity generation can use sequences, identity columns, triggers, generator servers, local generation, and batch generation. The object model will look same whichever storage approach is used, so the rest of the application is decoupled from these implementation issues.

FORM provides developers with an integration of object modeling and relational modeling. It provides an abstraction of the database almost identical to OQL (Object Query Language of the ODMG, see http://www.odmg.org/) and has full query functionality. Queries are specified in terms of objects, attributes, associations, and variables. This allows both simple and sophisticated queries to be expressed more easily than through direct SQL while still supporting the properties of relational theory.

Documentation

• Learning FORM: A Detailed Description of a Framework for Object-Relational Mapping
• The FORM Programming API
• The FORM Examples as directly viewable HTML

FORM Project Releases