About Ebean ORM: - LGPL license - Uses JPA annotations for mapping (@OneToMany etc) - Session less API (no merge, flush etc) - Automatic query tuning via "Autofetch" - Full support for partial objects This release contains: Local sorting and filtering of lists of entities (in memory without going back to the database). Refer: http://www.avaje.org/static/javadoc/pub/com/avaje/ebean/Filter.html Enhanced Query execution statistics, and linking of Autofetch tuned queries to their query statistics. To demonstrate this you can view the Query execution statistics and Autofetch meta data for the avaje website at: http://www.avaje.org/metaquerystats.html Support for updating only properties that have changed. Cheers, Rob.

Somebody should invent a Structured Query Language, kind of DSL for database access. Would be beneficial to server-side programming.

Somebody should invent a Structured Query Language, kind of DSL for database access. Would be beneficial to server-side programming.

Eh...there's LINQ, it rocks too, but only natively supported in c# so far. The only implementation I know for java is this one: https://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=46887. Without closures and lambda expressions it's difficult to have a type safe implementation incorporated into the language, peerhaps using JRuby.

The JPA 2.0 Draft has some strongly typed query support (via generated Meta objects from memory). Personally I'd struggle to call it "pretty" though from the examples I have seen :) For Ebean the automatic query tuning (via "Autofetch") can take care of the select and joins for you. Still, would be nice to have stronger typing for the where and orderBy clauses... Cheers, Rob.

Dreamsource ORM takes care of the select and joins with stronger typing for the select, join, where and orderBy clauses. Dreamsource ORM and EBean provide different approach from JPA 2.0. Dreamsource ORM also supports object graph query with help of TableRelation or Fetch object. Dreamsource ORM uses Table and Column for mapping. Ebean uses the same as JPA for mapping. Jim http://www.leeonsoft.com http://code.google.com/p/dreamsource-orm/

The Apache OpenJPA project is providing a JPA 2.0 implementation at [1] and has just announced an Early Access milestone 2 preview build for testing purposes only at [2]. You can try out the current meta-model implementation, but we expect there will be more API changes in the next public draft of the JSR-317 spec. [1] http://openjpa.apache.org/ [2] http://openjpa.apache.org/2009/06/03/openjpa-20-milestone-2-distribution-is-available.html -Donald

Somebody should invent a Structured Query Language, kind of DSL for database access. Would be beneficial to server-side programming.

Har! Droll, very droll...