Alternatives to Hibernate

August 23, 2008 | 1 Minute Read
This post was originally posted on my old blog.

Update: See my wiki page here for a more recent overview.

I just came across Carbonado, another persistence abstraction for Java. This is another alternative to Hibernate/JPA.

Carbonado implements the ActiveRecord pattern, which pursuits quite another design-paradigm than the DataMapper pattern, which usually is implemented by JPA and Hibernate.

As a reference I try to list the current persistence frameworks for Java. The list is certainly not complete... please leave a comment if you know another framework.

Most familiar are the mainstream JPA providers :

Hibernate

TopLink / TopLink Essentials / EclipseLink

KODO / OpenJPA

JPOX

There are other, less well known JPA-Providers:

Apache Cayenne

Raisin Amber

DataNucleus

CocoBase

Frameworks following another paradigm:

Carbonado

iBatis

Ebean

For the Java-Platform there exist other interesting alternatives:

JRuby with ActiveRecord

Groovy with GORM