I think Hibernate is a good product, but as with all other O/R-mapping
products you have to produce a rather complicated configuration file.
And using some sort of generator, like Middlegen, is almost a must if
you don't want to kill yourself by writing java classes for every
table in your database schema.

An more table oriented alternative to Hibernate is
http://butler.sourceforge.net. Using butler you access the database
using Table, Record and Query objects (or generated subclasses). The
only configuration you will have to do is to provide a jdbc driver and
url. You will be able to start using it much faster and you will have
the same power. Butler also has a set of data-aware swing components
and a JSP tag library for simplifying client development.

/Fredrik

Hi,

I was responsible for choosing a non-commercial alternative for TopLink
almost 2 years ago. I chose Hibernate not mainly because it offered more
than other opensource tools, but because the support in the opensource
community seemed to be promising. Hibernate is supported by lots of other
tools (Middlegen, xdoclet, AndroMDA, Spring framework, Eclipse plugins).

Since then Hibernate has become the standard OR mapping tool for our
development group and we have not encountered anything that speaks against
Hibernate.

I think it is currently the best OR mapping tool regarding the support
available.

Bye,
       Richard