bah

One day someone will write the perfect Java database access layer. By perfect, I mean “Does everything _I_ want, and doesn’t make me do anything I don’t want to do, and doesn’t require XML configuration files either”. I’ve been investigating a few of them, and none of them really quite cut it….though simpleorm is pretty close to what I’m looking for. It has a couple of minor annoyances though…first, it needs to support the JDBC driver you’re using – my first experimentation with it didn’t work, since it didn’t seem to recognise the official MySQL connecter/J drivers….but at work using the Oracle driver was no problem. Secondly for its support for foreign key references to work, the foreign key field must either be named the same as the primary key of the linked table, or be SOMEPREFIX + the primary key. The apparent solution to the problem of a primary key named ID and an foreign key named Account_No is either 1. rename the fields, 2 create a database view, or 3. don’t use the feature. Not very helpful.
However, I think I’ll probably still use it anyway, because it’s still the lightest of any ORM or Database access library I’ve seen yet.