Java - JDBC alternatives [closed]

Answer 1

Use hibernate as a stand alone JAR file then distribute it to your different web apps. This far is the best solution out there. You have to design your Classes, Interfaces, Enums to do an abstract DAO pattern. As long as you have correct entities and mappings. You will only need to work with Objects(Entities) and not HSQL.

Answer 2

Have a look at MyBatis. Often being overlooked, but great for read-only complex queries using proprietary features of your DBMS.

http://www.mybatis.org

Answer 3

Hibernate, surely. It's popular, there is even a .NET version.

Also, hibernate can be easily integrated with Spring framework.

And, it will mostly fit any developer needs.

Answer 4

There is also torque (http://db.apache.org/torque/) which I personally prefer because it's simpler, and does exactly what I need.

With torque I can define a database with mysql(Well I use Postgresql, but Mysql is supported too) and Torque can then query the database and then generate java classes for each table in the database. With Torque you can then query the database and get back Java objects of the correct type.

It supports where clauses (Either with a Criteria object or you can write the sql yourself) and joins.

It also support foreign keys, so if you got a User table and a House table, where a user can own 0 or more houses, there will be a getHouses() method on the user object which will give you the list of House objects the user own.

To get a first look at the kind of code you can write, take a look at http://db.apache.org/torque/releases/torque-3.3/tutorial/step5.html which contains examples which show how to load/save/query data with torque. (All the classes used in this example are auto-generated based on the database definition).

Answer 5

I can recommend Hibernate. It is widely used (and for good reasons), and the fact that the Java Persistence API specification was lead by the main designer of Hibernate guarantees that it will be around for the foreseeable future :-) If portability and vendor neutrality is important to you, you may use it via JPA, so in the future you can easily switch to another JPA implementation.

Lacking personal experience with JDO, I can't really compare the two. However, the benefits of Hibernate (or ORM in general) at first sight seem to be pretty much the same as what is listed on the JDO page. To me the most important points are:

• DB neutrality: Hibernate supports several SQL dialects in the background, switching between DBs is as easy as changing a single line in your configuration
• performance: lazy fetching by default, and a lot more optimizations going on under the hood, which you woulds need to handle manually with JDBC
• you can focus on your domain model and OO design instead of lower level DB issues (but you can of course fine-tune DML and DDL if you wish so)

One potential drawback (of ORM tools in general) is that it is not that suitable for batch processing. If you need to update 1 million rows in your table, ORM by default will never perform as well as a JDBC batch update or a stored procedure. Hibernate can incorporate stored procedures though, and it supports batch processing to some extent (I am not familiar with that yet, so I can't really say whether it is up to the task in this respect compared to JDBC - but judging from what I know so far, probably yes). So if your app requires some batch processing but mostly deals with individual entities, Hibernate can still work. If it is predominantly doing batch processing, maybe JDBC is a better choice.

Answer 6

JPA/Hibernate is a popular choice for ORM. It can provide you with just about every ORM feature that you need. The learning curve can be steep for those with basic ORM needs.

There are lots of alternatives to JPA that provide ORM with less complexity for developers with basic ORM requirements. Query sourceforge for example: http://sourceforge.net/directory/language:java/?q=ORM

I am partial to my solution, Sormula: sourceforge or bitbucket. Sormula was designed to minimize complexity while providing basic ORM.