Jalapeño is a tool to abstract your developer from the persistence layer in a Caché database. Hibernate is a tool to abstract your developer from the persistence layer in a (general) relational database. Comparing these two is a bit like comparing apples and oranges...

Object databases are a good choice for a limited set of applications, relational databases are a good choice for a broader set of applications (and give you *way* more opportunity to shoot yourself in the foot).

No matter what "abstraction" tool you choose, if you choose the wrong persistence model, you'll be in a world of pain.

Ultimately, *ANY* tool that keeps your developer from understanding how data is persisted is a tool that will only cause grief at scale. The more abstracted the persistence, the bigger pain in solving the inevitable problems.

Nay, give me a human developer with a brain on his shoulder and some actual experience building large-scale systems. That person can do code reviews and teach solid techniques.

Spend more time up-front in development, spend less time "post-release" chasing fires. Sadly, deadline-driven development doesn't accept this.

I've been using Hibernate Annotations since I started using Hibernate about a year and a half ago. The only XML file I need to touch is the one listing the classes, which is hardly a huge overhead.

Admittedly having the mapping details in the same source as the domain object reduces separation, but I suspect that will very rarely be an issue - and XML configuration is always an option if necessary.

Jon Skeet

Hibernate also offers XML free mappings via Hibernate Annotations - most of the annotations seem to be standard EJB 3.

Jalapeño does support database independence by providing an export utility that will convert the Caché class schema (originally derived from pure Java class definitions) to a DDL file that can be imported into a relational database. The Object Manager automatically uses object persistence methods (Open, Save, New, Delete) when accessing Caché, and relational persistence methods (Select, Update, Insert, Delete) when it is configured to connect to a relational database.

Hibernate 3.x provides XML to relational database mapping for storing XML documents, which Jalapeno doesn't.