iBatis is in the news.... ================================ http://www.javalobby.org/nl/archive/jlnews_20060808o.html
On Hibernate vs. iBatis (one more time!) Since we built and deployed dzone.com back in June, Ive had several people IM or email me asking about the infrastructure and why we chose iBatis over something like Hibernate or even straight JDBC. The truth is, what worked for us, may not be the most optimal solution for others. When we built dzone, we were fairly confident in our ability to write queries that wouldnt bring down the entire site each time they ran. We also were fairly confident those queries could scale. When evaluating the different options, we were a little scared by the black box that general comes with most of the ORM layers. Methods are called, queries are generated, data pops out in the database or in your business logic and no one is ever the wiser. All that being said, there are definitely ups and downs with any solution you choose. As I mentioned last week, we found ourselves in a quagmire of XML, making it hard to find out if we had already written a query that did something similar to what we were trying to add during this cycle of development. Also, if we hadnt been confident in our SQL skills, Hibernate would have been a much higher candidate. Even with the power that iBatis gives you; I have to admit that the documentation and community that Hibernate provides is tough to beat. If there were one piece of advice to give to people starting new projects and trying to choose a persistence layer, it would be to think ahead a bit. Things like clustering, or advanced caching may be much more difficult to implement using one of the frameworks compared to the other. I would also recommend coding to an interface for your data layer, this way, should you have to go back later you wont have to change all your business logic to use the new DAO it should just work. Good luck with your decisions, and as always feel free to email or IM with your questions. Until Next Time, Matthew Schmidt [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo IM: mattschmidtjl
