In essence, a persistent business object is a program component that allows the developer to store and retrieve information about the state of a program's user, another object in the application, or information about the application itself. To accomplish this, the object must read from and write to a database. Object persistence has become increasingly important in the move towards truly object-oriented business solutions and the loosely-coupled development style advanced by SOAP, Web Services, and .NET platforms. This manual contains technical information on implementing persistence for business objects in a relational database management system using the Java programming language. It explores the major persistence methodologies available to Java developers.