Re: Non-ORM layers over JDBC

["Stephen Denne" <Stephen(dot)Denne(at)datamail(dot)co(dot)nz>]

Craig Ringer wrote
> I'm fairly new to Java (sorry!) and struggling with the 
> database access 
> area. My PostgreSQL database is fairy complex and significant 
> parts of 
> its user interface are through stored procedures etc. I've 
> been looking 
> into Hibernate / Hibernate EntityManager and other EJB3-compatible 
> tools, but they all seem to be oriented toward 
> database-independence and 
> using the DB as a dumb storage engine. They even implement their own 
> outer joins (!) and other core DB functionality. Currently 
> I'm trying to 
> figure out why a "SELECT c FROM customer c;" (Hibernate-style) is 
> introducing a WHERE clause for on the customer's bank_id when 
> executed 
> ... so I'm not impressed so far.

A lot of ORMs are designed for ease of persisting objects, not ease of realising databases.

Though I haven't used it, so can't guess whether it would be a good match for your needs or not... one tool I think may make the database to object mapping easier is ActiveObjects.

> However, I've also looked at raw JDBC code, and it seems to be very 
> verbose with a lot of manual data conversion and little language 
> integration.

I use and quite like Spring-JDBC. Among other things, it makes JDBC use much less verbose.

In Java, a lot of projects use some form of data-binding between their GUI and Objects, then an ORM to persist those Objects to a DB.

Regards,
Stephen Denne.

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