[macspoofing]

>And this has made your life easier has it?

Yes it has. Belive me, it has. And it isn't nearly as bad as you make it out, certainly better than the alternative. If you have relatively simple relational data, and query requirements, you can get away with just Object and Criteria queries. Your code will thank you. For more complex queries, HQL will get you down almost to the bare metal. Why do that in lieu of raw SQL? I mentioned several reasons. One of which, is that the ORM layer does abstract the boilerplate of query to-and-fro serialization. More than that, it enforces constraints. Your DBMS doesn't give a shit whether ages should be in some valid range, or have some sort of valid format, or whatnot. Those constraints are in your object model, which is then automagically transferred to your SQL commands. Another reason is that you can now substitute SQL backends, trivially. Going from MySQL to Postgres is a one-liner. Another reason, caching is completely transparent. You can now plug-in any kind of caching engine and strategy with a one-line config change, and it's all completely transparent to your application. Another reason, your framework (JEE or Spring) probably has hooks to your ORM, which makes the integration completely seamless.

The thing is, if you didn't go with an ORM framework, you'd probably roll your own abstraction layer to take care of some (all?) of the above mentioned use-cases. You don't want serialization code, or caching code, or constraint-enforcing code littering your business logic. So this abstraction is good. There may be reasons to forgo an ORM framework, but I sincerely believe the vast majority of use cases will benefit from it.

[GhotiFish]

If you insist, because I really want the months of debugging work we've spent on hibernate to pay dividends, I really really want the technical debt we've accumulated capitulating to the abstractions limitations in our design to be paid, and I really really really want to believe that we haven't wasted our time on an silver bullet that fits only trivial cases. I want to believe that serialization, caching, and constraint enforcement are far bigger nightmares than the one I'm going through.

I just don't think that will happen.