Persistence Strategy for Standalone Desktop Java Application

Question

(Only managed to find one other question on this - Object persistence strategy for desktop application)

I have a basic Java Swing application - which needs to access / persist a few thousand POJOs. I may need to run basic queries on these.

Originally I looked at JPA-Hibernate + HSQLDB, but this slows app start-up time and I figured it was overkill for my query requirements.

I simplified my data model and started looking at Document DBs - mongodb is great but it isnt really suited for non-server environments; starting up and shutting down the mongod process from Java (using ProcessBuilder) is fiddly and I really want an embedded solution.

I really want a fast, lightweight persistence tool with basic query functions that can be embedded in a Java app.

Are these the only options?

• http://prevayler.org/
• Java Embedded Database (HSQL) without ORM
• Java Serialization to filesystem
• JSON persisted to flat files?
• XStream (and XBird? - http://code.google.com/p/xbird/)
• OODB
• JCR Implementation ?

Can anyone offer any other advice / suggestions? At what point would serializing a large List of POJO's start to really hurt performance?

Thanks

edit: Just found this post - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2825491/are-there-any-embeddable-document-database-engines-for-java-something-similar-t recommending Orient - http://code.google.com/p/orient/

Answer 1

I recently used db4o (http://www.db4o.com/) as a data store for a standalone desktop application. Its an object data base which can be run in embedded mode w/o a server running in the background.