ORM Technologies vs JDBC ?

Question

Hi,

My question is regarding ORM and JDBC technologies, on what criteria would you decide to go for an ORM technology as compared to JDBC and other way round ?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Complexity.

ORM If your application is domain driven and the relationships among objects is complex or you need to have this object defining what the app does.

JDBC/SQL If your application is simple enough as to just present data directly from the database or the relationships between them is simple enough.

The book "Patterns of enterprise application architecture" by Martin Fowler explains much better the differences between these two types:

See: Domain Model and Transaction Script

Answer 2

It also depends on the learning curve.

Ebean ORM has a pretty low learning curve (simple API, simple query language) if you are happy enough with JPA annotations for mapping (@Entity, @Table, @OneToMany etc).