Which Java database API is easiest to use?

Question

I am coming back to Java from Ruby and ActiveRecord and want to use something as easy as ActiveRecord in Ruby. What options do I have?

Answer 1

There is a project that a colleague recently released called ActiveJDBC that is an implementation of ActiveRecord for Java.

Answer 2

It'll probably some sort of Object Relational Mapping framework you end up using. Grails (a Java Rails like framework) has GORM:

http://www.grails.org/GORM

If you're not using a web framework like that then it'll prob. be some sort of ORM framework - Hibernate, OpenJPA etc...

http://www.hibernate.org/

If you don't want to do the full heavyweight ORM way then look at something like MyBatis (used to be iBatis) which has SQLMaps:

http://www.mybatis.org/