Deprecating the DAO framework?

[Clinton Begin]

Hi all,

I think we should deprecate the iBATIS DAO framework for these reasons:

• In my opinion, the iBATIS Mapper does a fantastic job of isolating the persistence layer as is. 
  
• I've personally started to shy away from data access layers.
  
• For most applications, there's no big deal in having a dependency on SqlMapClient.
• If you do use a DAO layer, I suggest Spring DAO
• If you can't use Spring DAO, I suggest writing your own DAO layer that is as simple as possible and tuned for your environment.
• I don't believe very many people use the DAO framework, for those that do, you can safely continue to do so.  It hasn't changed in years, and so it likely won't. 
  

Deprecation would basically mean we take it off the website as a downloadable component and remove the doc links etc.  Of course we'd still answer the odd question on the mailing list, but we'd likely not adopt any changes and possibly not even fix any bugs (but you're welcome to take the source and use it under the Apache License).

What do you think?  Thoughts?

Cheers,
Clinton