What are the DAO, DTO and Service layers in Spring Framework?
I am writing RESTful services using spring and hibernate. I read many resource in internet, but they did not clarify my doubts. Please explain me in details what are DAO, DTO and Service layers in spring framework? And why usage of these layers is required in spring to develop RESTfull API services.
Solution 1:
First off, these concepts are Platform Agnostic and are not exclusive to Spring Framework or any other framework, for that matter.
Data Transfer Object
DTO
is an object that carries data between processes. When you're working with a remote interface, each call it is expensive. As a result you need to reduce the number of calls. The solution is to create a Data Transfer Object
that can hold all the data for the call. It needs to be serializable to go across the connection. Usually an assembler is used on the server side to transfer data between the DTO
and any domain objects. It's often little
more than a bunch of fields and the getters and setters for them.
Data Access Object
A Data Access Object
abstracts and encapsulates all access to
the data source. The DAO
manages the connection with the data source to
obtain and store data.
The DAO implements the access mechanism required to work with the data source.
The data source could be a persistent store like an RDBMS
, or a business service accessed via REST
or SOAP
.
The DAO
abstracts the underlying data access implementation for the Service
objects to
enable transparent access to the data source. The Service
also delegates
data load and store operations to the DAO
.
Service
Service
objects are doing the work that the
application needs to do for the domain you're working with. It involves calculations based on inputs and
stored data, validation of any data that comes in from the presentation, and figuring out exactly what data
source logic to dispatch, depending on commands received from the presentation.
A Service Layer
defines an application's boundary and its set of available operations from
the perspective of interfacing client layers. It encapsulates the application's business logic, controlling
transactions and coordinating responses in the implementation of its operations.
Recommended References
Martin Fowler has a great book on common Application Architecture Patterns named Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. There is also, Core J2EE Patterns that worth looking at.
Solution 2:
DAO - Data Access Object:
An object that provides a common interface to perform all database operations like persistence mechanism.
public interface GenericDao<T> {
public T find(Class<T> entityClass, Object id);
public void save(T entity);
public T update(T entity);
public void delete(T entity);
public List<T> findAll(Class<T> entityClass);
}
See this example : Spring – DAO and Service layer
DTO - Data Transfer Object:
An object that carries data between processes in order to reduce the number of method calls means you combine more than one POJO entities in service layer.
For example a GET request /rest/customer/101/orders
is to retrieve all the orders for customer id 101
along with customer details hence you need combine entity Customer
and entity Orders
with details.