[commandlinefan]

What I can't fully get my head around is how defensive people get about things like Hibernate. I've tried it out, and it doesn't do much for me, but it doesn't really get in my way, either; I can work just as fast with Hibernate as I can with JDBC. I think part of the reason for that, though, is that I can work at either level; I can work out in my head what Hibernate is doing and work with it rather than against it. Somebody higher up retorted with, "why not just write your own web server?" Indeed, why not? I've done it for relatively simple REST-API type cases; as long as you don't need a lot of the more complex HTTP cases like continuation messages, caching, digest authentication and redirects, why not? It's nice to have everything under your control and it's almost definitely faster than any third-party solution that's going to have been written to deal with dozens of corner cases that aren't relevant to what you're doing.