JavaBoutique has published an interesting interview with Bruce Tate: Interview: Bruce Tate on the “Politics of Persistence”. (I’m not sure if this is a new article, I can’t find the publish date anywhere. This is actually number 3 in Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003: Undated Content.)
Bruce has some good advice on which frameworks to use for ORM:
I typically tell a customer to start with the simplest possible solution. The simplest is JDBC…The most important of the JDBC-wrapping frameworks called iBATIS… The iBATIS framework differs from the typical object relational mapping framework in that you’re mapping to the results of an SQL query instead of a relational schema… If iBATIS isn’t enough, I try Hibernate… If Hibernate isn’t enough, I move to something like JDO… Now there’s also the emerging EJB3 standard… is a merger of EJB and JDO into a combined persistence specification.
But ORM frameworks don’t mean you don’t have to know anything about databases:
Making the conscious decision to isolate yourself from the work of writing code is different from isolating yourself from understanding the details of the relational database… You can use Hibernate effectively because you understand what’s going on under the covers.
He also gives his opinion about Toplink and the future of persistence frameworks. Worth a read.