The legend of the Tower of Babel depicts the fact that humans lost the ability to speak a common language and began to use different dialects, making communication between them far more difficult.

Since newspapers first started to print, the basic unit of news has been the article, an unstructured blob of data. A news article contains standard elements like a headline, quotes, facts and photos.

Like it or not, data is an integral part of any application, even cool object-oriented ones. Everything stops at the persistence layer, where Java developers traditionally have had to write complex ...