Hibernate vs OJB - Book Related

[Mark Spritzler]

Hi John,

Good to see you back at the ranch.

I was wondering if you could share with us all your views on the Data Access/ mapping portion of your book, regarding OJB, and your view on Hibernate as a different choice for OR Mapping.

I understand that if you were to include Hibernate instead of OJB in your book then it would grow to over 1000 pages.

Mark

p.s. Do not include this as an entry into the book giveaway, I already have the first and second editions of this book.

[John Carnell]

Hi Mark,

I am torn myself. I really like OJB and have used it on projects. It is a great tool. However, I think Hibernate has garnered the lion share of the open source O/R backers.

I think Hibernate is an excellent O/R tool and it very easy to use. I think one of the key reasons why it has become so popular is that is has excellent documentation. Its documentation is complete and it comes with lots of well-documented examples.

OJB has in my experience, been lacking in documentation and as such is difficult for developers to pick up. It has a steeper learning curve. It kinda of comes down to one of my rules: "If I can get a simple example to work in 20 minutes, something is wrong."

Don't get me wrong, I love OJB, but these days I am leaning more and more to Hibernate. There is more material and tools then OJB. (Believe I dont say that to start a religious war. Thomas Mahler and I have talked previously and I really love a lot of the stuff they do in OJB.)
As for books, I really like Bruce Tate's "Faster Lighter Java." Bruce is really a forward thinking and very articulate guy and his latest book does nice job of giving a high-level overview of Hibernate.

Another great Hibernate book is O'Reilly's Hibernate: A Developers Notebook. Its a very thin, concise book that does a great job of giving an overview of Hibernate.

Thanks,
John

[Mark Spritzler]

Funny you mention those two books. At JavaOne, I got lighter, faster at the JetBrains booth, where Bruce was signing copies of his book.

And I also bought the Hibernate, a developer's notebook from the bookstore at JavaOne.

Talk to you later

Mark