Hi Joe, I don't have a Cayenne vs Hibernate comparison, but I can tell you a little about how things have shifted a bit where I work.
Hibernate was the official ORM for non-WebObjects projects, which use EOF, of course. (We have a lot of legacy WO projects to maintain.) The WO people were much more interested in Cayenne since it mirrored EOF quite a bit. The non-WO people were much more interested in Hibernate because it was the "hip" ORM. Management chose Hibernate because it was the de-facto standard ORM in the Java community (everyone was using it) and they based part of that decision on the job search issue (who has Hibernate on their resume vs Cayenne). About 4-5 months ago, though, there was a small revolt by the developers, led in large part by the non-WO developers -- that is, the ones who wanted to use Hibernate because it was the standard ORM in the Java community (and had the buzz/mindshare behind it). Many of them were tired with problems they kept encountering with Hibernate (especially the lazy initialization exception). After many meetings/debates/etc, Cayenne got approved for general use and now several projects (including a large one that has a huge Hibernate-based backend already) are using Cayenne. The project I'm working on now consists of three Tapestry 5-based web applications with a common shared Cayenne-based core and that mirrors many of our other projects (we tend to separate out admin-restricted interfaces from user-exposed interfaces). >From a personal perspective, the previous project I worked on is based on Tapestry 5 and Hibernate. (The developers voted at the beginning of the project between Hibernate and Cayenne and Cayenne lost by one vote.) There were numerous places in the application that we had to do things "backwards" due to Hibernate and the lazy initialization exception. For example, much of the application follows a wizard-based entry system and the user chooses their state on one page and then their county on another page. We couldn't call state.getCounties() on the county page because the state's Hibernate session was closed and would throw an exception. Things like that are natural in Cayenne and Just Work. What we had to do was construct a new query for the counties based upon the state. I joked around that with Hibernate, we might as well not have relationships because we don't use them because we can't follow them. mrg On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 2:21 PM, Joe Baldwin <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I am again responsible for making a cogent Cayenne vs Hibernate Comparison. > Before I "reinvent the wheel" so-to speak with a new evaluation, I would like > to find out if anyone has done a recent and fair comparison/evaluation (and > has published it). > > When I initially performed my evaluation of the two, it seemed like a very > easy decision. While Hibernate had been widely adopted (and was on a number > of job listings), it seemed like the core decision was made mostly because > "everyone else was using it" (which I thought was a bit thin). > > I base my decision on the fact that Cayenne (at the time) supported enough of > the core ORM features that I needed, in addition to being very similar > conceptually to NeXT EOF (which was the first stable Enterprise-ready ORM > implementations). Cayenne seems to support a more "agile" development model, > while being as (or more) mature than EOF. (In my opinion. :) ) > > It seem like there is an explosion of standards, which appear to be driven by > "camps" of opinions on the best practices for accomplishing abstraction of > persistence supporting both native apps and highly distributed SOA's. > > My vote is obviously for Cayenne, but I would definitely like to update my > understanding of the comparison. > > Thanks, > Joe > >
