Re: Cayenne vs Hibernate Comparison

From: Michael Gentry (mgentr..asslight.net)
Date: Mon Sep 06 2010 - 14:21:31 UTC

  • Next message: Theresa Stewart: "Re: Cayenne vs Hibernate Comparison"

    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 <jfbaldwi..arthlink.net> 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
    >
    >



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Mon Sep 06 2010 - 14:22:24 UTC