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Fénix Framework allows the development of Java-based applications that need a transactional and persistent domain model. Even though it was originally created to support the development of web applications, it may be used to develop any other kind of application that needs to keep a persistent set of data.
One of the major design goals underlying the development of the Fénix Framework is that it should provide a natural programming model to programmers used to develop plain Java programs without persistence. Unfortunately, the addition of persistence, typically backed up by a relational database management system, interferes with the normal coding patterns of object-oriented programming, because the need to access the database efficiently precludes the use of many of the powerful mechanisms available in the object-oriented paradigm.
Other frameworks and tools, often called Object/Relational Mappers, address this problem by giving the programmer ways to specify how objects are mapped into the relational database and by doing most of the heavy-lifting needed to access the data in the database. Yet, they fail to hide completely the presence of the database, meaning that the problem remains.
With the Fénix Framework, on the other hand, the database is completely hidden from the programmer. This has two consequences: (1) the programmer cannot control the mapping of objects to the database, and (2) there is no way to take advantage of database facilities such as joins or aggregate functions. In return, programmers may use, and are encouraged to do it, all of the normal object-oriented programming coding patterns.
Programmers using the Fénix Framework specify the structure of the application's domain model using a new domain-specific language created to that effect, the Domain Modeling Language (DML), and then develop the rest of the application in plain Java.
The core code of what later became the Fénix Framework started to be developed in 2004 and was first put into production in 2005, as part of the FenixEDU project. It has been powering the FenixEDU web application since then, and several other applications over the last couple of years. It is, therefore, a mature framework, even though it continues to be developed and there are many lines of development pushing it into other directions.
This site focuses on Fénix Framework versions >= 2.0. For documentation concerning versions 1.x, take a look here.