[namero999]

I've found the nirvana with MyBatis https://code.google.com/p/mybatis/

I've benchmarked it and it adds roughly a 3% on top of raw JDBC, and allows different styles of usage. You can have your pojos annotated and get mapping for free, or (what I like) you can extract your SQL queries in XML files, name them and refer them from code with sql.insert("namedQuery", params);

It is super smart when it comes to mapping/aggregations and it is highly extensible to allow the transparent use of custom mappers and logics. Highly recommended.

[beermann]

I used mybatis at a former company. I liked it, but on the spectrum of ORM-like frameworks, it had just enough non-code configuration behind it that junior developers, or developers who aren't working in that type of code very often, struggle with how to get new data objects persisted. In my opinion, this stemmed from using XML files to define the mappers and queries. Most people just never knew where to look for that stuff, or exactly how it should be used.

In the end, I try to pick the option that is easiest to read and understand. I've had a terrible time with JPA/Hibernate (I hate that the ORM ends up affecting your schema at all), I had a good experience with Mybatis, and so far I'm really liking JDBI (although see my other comment here about documentation). I don't want raw JDBC, but JDBI seems to be the right tradeoff of power/ease of understanding. I think that the annotated use of mybatis would get you this as well, but I haven't used it.

[pramalin]

I have also used MyBatis in few projects and recommend it for applications that are database centric. I would use ORM only if the requirements call for object persistence and be DB/SQL agnostic.