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# Typical Development Stages

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This section describes the general development stages of a TopLink application. Figure: TopLink Development Process illustrates the TopLink development process.

TopLink Development Process

Description of "TopLink Development Process"

Design the Application (1)

Define your application requirements, select an architecture, and determine the target platform. See "Designing Your Application With TopLink" for more information. Remember, TopLink works with any architecture and any platform.

When designing the application, you should also create an object model for the application. See "Understanding Object Persistence" for more information. It is important to create the object model before using TopLink to map objects, because defining persistent mappings for an incorrect or rapidly changing model can be very difficult.

Develop the Application (2, 3, 4)

Create the Java classes and decide how the classes should be implemented by the data source. When working with a legacy system, decide how the classes relate to the existing data. If there is no legacy data source to integrate, decide how to store each class in the data source and create the required schema. Alternatively, you may use TopLink to create your initial tables.

Using TopLink Workbench, create descriptors and mappings for the persistent classes. Use TopLink sessions to manipulate the persistent classes, including querying and changing data. See Using TopLink Development Tools for more information.

Avoid building all your model's descriptors in a single iteration. Start with a small subset of your classes. Build and test their descriptors, then gradually add new descriptors and relationships. This lets you catch common problems before they proliferate through your entire design.

Write Java code to use database sessions. Sessions are used to query for database objects and write objects to the database. See Understanding TopLink Sessions for more information.

Deploy the Application (5)

Generate, package, then deploy the necessary files to your application server. The required information will vary, depending on your environment and architecture. See Deploying a TopLink Application for more information.

Maintain the Application (6)

TopLink includes many options that can enhance application performance. You can customize most aspects of TopLink to suit your requirements. Use advanced TopLink features or write custom querying routines to access the database in specific ways, and to optimize performance. See Optimizing and Customizing a TopLink Application for more information.