Experiences With Active Objects ORM for Java?

Question

I'm looking at ORMs for Java and Active Objects caught my eye. Apparently, it was inspired by Rails' ActiveRecord. Based on what I've read, this approach seems to solve a lot of problems with existing Java ORMs by embracing convention over configuration.

What's been your experience with it?

Answer 1

Be careful that you don't wander into "silver bullet syndrome"... I just hear devs saying "convention over configuration" and think it's a great thing...

Daniel Spiewak is a solid programmer, I've learned a lot from his blog, but this is a fairly simple API. That means, don't expect a ton of experience with production usage, working in a high-load environment, etc. But sometimes, all you need is simple, and well, there are other projects, like Databinder that integrate with Active Objects. (Wicket + Databinder is a pretty nice, lightweight web framework for Java.)

But, for example, I'd stay away from a persistence framework like this if I was doing a lot of batch processing. Mostly, because I want:

1. Immutable objects by default, which naturally flows into multi-threaded processing, because you force people to a "delete/create new" instead of "update" sort of paradigm, which saves a lot of disk usage in many DBs.
2. DB access that considers simplifying IO by using specialized commands like COPY

I've solved a lot of DB performance problems by just writing straight SQL code, replacing the use of an ORM that wasn't suited for the task.

Answer 2

DISCLAIMER: I am the primary developer working on a project called ActiveJDBC which shares some design goals with ActiveRecord and is actively in development:

http://javalite.io

Answer 3

Active Objects is under active development at the moment, thanks in part to being picked up by Atlassian as a likely plugin data persistence engine to use with its suite of enterprise software.

The Active Objects project is now housed at http://java.net/projects/activeobjects/pages/Home

The Atlassian plugin that uses Active Objects is tracked at https://studio.atlassian.com/browse/AO

In particular, note that Atlassian have just started to build the documentation for the Active Objects Library, at https://developer.atlassian.com/display/AO/Active+Objects

The code hosting is being migrated to BitBucket, and the SCM from svn to mercurial. Watch bitbucket.org/activeobjects/ for progress on that front.