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\title{Gene expression data annotation, effective storage, and enrichment through data mining.}
\author{
	Efstathios~Sideris
}

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\subsubsection{Object persistence}
\label{sec:persistence}
In order to make the persistence mechanisms of \meditor{} extensible,
the necessary functionality has been concentrated in the abstracted
class \texttt{MEStorageDriver} of the
\texttt{org.biomap.meditor.persistence} package. This allows different
possible underlying persistence mechanisms accessible through the same
interface, something that during the course of development has proven
useful in the testing stages, for the prototyping of persistence. More
specifically, persistence was initially developed as a prototype in
the \texttt{MEFileStorageDriver} subclass of \texttt{MEStorageDriver}
and later the \texttt{MEDatabaseStorageDriver} class implemented full
persistence.

\paragraph{File-based persistence prototype}
The abstraction of object persistence by the \texttt{MEStorageDriver}
class proved valuable at the early stages of development, when more
emphasis was put to the development of the GUI. At this stage, it was
necessary to have a prototype persistence mechanism that would allow
the testing of the GUI and other aspects of \meditor{}. For this
purpose, the \texttt{MEFileStorageDriver} class was implemented, a
subclass of \texttt{MEStorageDriver} which implemented part of the
persistence mechanism by using Java serialization to files. Not all
the functionality was implemented, in some cases the concrete methods
of \texttt{MEFileStorageDriver} were just dummy methods that did not
perform any operation. This was sufficient for testing purposes, and
was replaced as soon as the grapical user interface was mature enough.

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