JRuby

The database cleanup is finally complete! Now I need to rewrite our web app's data access code. When we first created the database layer, we used the Hibernate framework. Since then Hibernate3 has been released and an upgrade is scheduled as part of this work. We did have some pain points with Hibernate, however. For instance, when I started evaluating our DB code, I noticed some DB queries that we don't explicitly create. Whether these were the result of a poor object-relational model, lazy instantiation, or some other Hibernate functionality is unknown at this time. I've found Hibernate (or at least how we're using Hibernate) complicated to debug. I'm going to take some time and look at Ruby and Rails as an alternative.

I've mentioned before that I've wanted to learn Ruby for a while and this seems like a good excuse. There is a Ruby library for Java called JRuby. The plan is to learn the JRuby Rails extensions and find out the effort to incorporate this framework into our existing Java APIs. I'll continue to post progress...

Discussion

Has anyone else explored JRuby as a replacement for Hibernate? How does the performance compare? What about ease of use?

More Info

JRuby on Wikipedia

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