Re: Non-ORM layers over JDBC

Stephen Denne wrote:

> I use and quite like Spring-JDBC. Among other things, it makes JDBC use much less verbose.

Yes, that looks very interesting, and much closer to what I'm after than
Hibernate, Toplink, etc.

Spring looks a bit like the Boost of the Java world, and it's a good
thing to know about in general.

> In Java, a lot of projects use some form of data-binding between their GUI and Objects, then an ORM to persist those Objects to a DB.

Yep, I got that impression. Most of them seem to be coming from the
opposite side to me, though - "I have a Java application that needs data
persistence" as opposed to "I have a database I need to provide a user
interface to". The former tends to lead to the desire for database
portability and a Java layer hiding the database; the latter makes
direct SQL database access with usable language interfaces more desirable.

The difference results in rather different design choices and needs,
making most of the ORM stuff fairly unattractive to me. In particular,
don't want the database specifics hidden. I'm already utterly tied to
PostgreSQL (but not to Java) and DB portability is just a limiting
annoyance. Perhaps if I'd started with a 3-tier design with a Java
application server it'd be different, but in the design as it stands the
database is very much the core with much of the "business logic" and
reporting smarts in PL/PgSQL. I'm not a fan of introducing an
essentially spurious middle layer or dumbing down my database use to
database-portable levels, so the ORM tools aren't too attractive.

Unfortunately the vast majority of the information out there approaches
database with Java from the java-centric rather than database-centric
angle, making it hard to find out about the sort of tools I'm after.

Thanks so much for the tip about Spring-JDBC . It looks pretty good.

--
Craig Ringer