Some time later this year we're probably going to replace the O/R mapping tool we use at work. There are a lot of alternatives out there, of various degrees of complexity and "completeness". One possibility is Hibernate and another is SimpleORM. They illustrate pretty well the two ends of the spectrum.

Hibernate describes itself as Hibernate is a powerful, ultra-high performance object/relational persistence and query service for Java. Hibernate lets you develop persistent objects following common Java idiom, including association, inheritance, polymorphism, composition and the Java collections framework..

On the other hand SimoleORM says It provides a simple but effective implementation of object/relational mapping on top of JDBC at low cost and low overhead. Not even an XML file to configure! Beyond pure Java, SimpleORM is 100% Clean Java. Minimal reflection, no pre processing, and certainly no byte code post processing(!) This simple and elegant framework does not require any clever tricks.

It's going to be interesting to decide which end of the spectrum we want to be at. We have a pretty extensive framework we developed ourselves for everything apart from the actual persisting and retrieval of the data. So we have to decide, do we want to replace all of the current framework with something like Hibernate, or just the O/R mapper code with something like SimpleORM.