Light weight alternative to Hibernate? [closed]

Answer 1

Cayenne has served me well. Relatively easy to understand and to get it up and running. I find the reverse engineering part particularly charming. Configuration can be done with a GUI.

Answer 2

I might be a bit late to the party, but I released ActiveJDBC in 2010, which is an ORM implementation of ActiveRecord pattern, is more than 10 times lighter than Hibernate in dependencies, at least twice as fast at run time, and requires zero configuration or annotations.

Answer 3

You might want to take a look at prevayler (on sourceforge). A somewhat more lightweight approach to persistence. Or were you thinking about doing reporting against the DB?

Answer 4

I created sormula as an alternative to heavyweight ORM's. It is CRUD-ready, POJO-friendly, simple to use, configure, and understand. Zero-configuration use is possible. www.sormula.org

Answer 5

Hibernate requires next to zero configuration if you use annotations. It even can auto-discover mapped beans in the classpath! I don't see any alternative to it from both simplicity and power point of view.

It can also expose itself as JPA, which is (IMHO) even simpler.

Answer 6

It still requires XML configuration, but have a look at MyBatis (formerly iBatis).