Recently I've begun to see some comments on Hibernate - both first impressions comments and have used (and still uses) comments.

Some of those sounded like real-life commercial taglines and I just thought it would be fun to collect some of these on this page. I'm only posting comments that has made the "public" somewhere else (like in the mailinglist or on someone's blog etc.)

So here they come:

I used to think a lot about object relational mapping and so on. Persistence to a database really used to be the most irritating thing you could do in Java, but then I discovered Hibernate. This thing solves around 95% of my object-relational problems, and it turns out the last 5% were the things that made all the other tools too complicated to use for the first 95%.

  Matt Hall

Well, now, for some Hibernate ramblings: what a nice tool! I loved it since the first time I read The Hitchhiker's Guide To Hibernate.

Carlos Villela

Hibernate + WebWork Two great products. After some help from fellow bloggers, another look at the webwork wiki, and a good read of hibernates excellent documentation, i am thoroughly impressed with both products. I have now been able to set up my domain model and map it to my datamodel, plus configured Hibernate to run in Orion (using it's connection pool). All in a days work! Thats damn impressive. Kudos to the Hibernate team.

Morten Wilken

I have been using Hibernate recently. It works, its simple, its powerful, XDoclet supports it, and of course... it is free. How can JDO compete with the likes of Hibernate and Castor on the "free" end, and CocoBase/TOPLink on the "not so free" end. Dion Almaer

Hibernate's query language (HQL) is extremely easy to use. In fact, I've been amazed at how I've been able to guess the syntax and get it right 9 times out of 10! It's the best of SQL and OQL. If you think HQL is good - wait until you checkout the Query by Criteria syntax (very cool IMO).

Matt Raible

The API and query language let you feel like you're working with an object-oriented database such as Versant, yet it supports blazing fast access to MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and many other relational databases. Though Hibernate works well both inside and outside of application servers, many programmers are beginning to consider Hibernate as a preferred alternative to CMP in J2EE environments. We believe Hibernate will begin to dominate the Open Source object/relational mapping tool market in the near future.

Everytime that the Hibernate team says that Hibernate is "oh so cool", and "it produces oh so optimized SQL" and "its oh so fast", I usually concur. However, I have often have this lingering, nagging feeling in my mind as to "well, how optimal can an ORM-based solution really be versus custom JDBC or BMP". Until now. I've been profiling my application (both Java and SQL) code extensively, and I've realized that any bottlenecks that I may have are not really in the data access code. Furthermore, after spending some time optimizing Hibernate queries and associations, I've to tell you that most of the time, I can't think of better custom (portable) SQL that I could have written. Amazing. Sigh. Wish everything was this good. Thanks folks!

Sandeep Dath