[royjacobs]

If you're going this way I would still recommend a library like jOOQ.

It gets out of the way and is very low-level, but it still allows you to build type-safe SQL instead of having to randomly concatenate strings in order to build your query.

This is especially useful if you have dynamic joins and things like that, which can get hairy fast if you're building them manually.

[oftenwrong]

+1 for jOOQ. I prefer to Just Write Queries than muck about with quirky ORM magic that gets turned into queries. jOOQ lets me do that with safe query building and type checking through to the DB level (with code gen).