Hi,
I am doing a fat swing app (but I want the middle tier also to work in a
distributed server environment). I've been looking for
an easy to use, but reliable obect-relational-mapper (ORM). My next to last
try was JBoss (EJB). However, I had not done
EJBs for a couple of years now and I had forgotten how horrible it is. I
spent more hours that I wanted trying to make
JBoss 3.2.2 work with Firebird using the Jaybird driver. I had not given
up but I started looking for an alternative.

Last week I found SimpleORM (http://www.simpleorm.org/). This is a very
simple but seemingly effective ORM.
I think the effectiveness comes because the author focused in solving the
80% solution (reliable moving data from a
relational db to objects) without attempting the silly extra 20% (trying to
hide that the data is coming
from a SQL database, like the latest sun's JDO).

I still haven't worked long enough with simple orm to know whether I can
trust it but things
look promising. I have two minor concerns: caching and the fact that it
piggy backs the connection in its thread local
space; the latter, in my experience, sometimes produces bugs that are very
hard to detect in multithreaded apps.
However, the code footprint of SimpleORM is still very small so bugs can be
easily understood and tracked.

Anyway, I wanted to inform you of this open source alternative. FYI, I also
created a driver for jaybird for this ORM
since it came with interclient support and not jaybird support (a very
simple exercise). I posted instructions on how to
do this in the simpleorm yahoo discussion site.

Please note that I am not associated in any way with SimpleORM.org, I just
think some of us may benefit
for a simple ORM with no bells and whistles but effective.


Agustin Gonzalez, Ph.D.
Director
Town Lake Software
www.townlakesoftware.com
512-422-6806


P.S. I also sent a copy of this email to the simpleorm group so they know
about firebird/jaybird.