I've used two different formal ORMs, ActiveRecord and JPA (backed by hibernate), and I've never felt completely at ease with them. In fact, I was lining up to agree that ORMs suck, except that I realized I'm probably using one no matter what I do.
If I have a model object, and I want to to persist it in a relational database, then I'm going to need to do something that persists and retrieves this object back and forth from the RDBMS, right? And if I want to retain the flexibility to switch to a different database (or different persistence strategy in general), then I'm going to some way to specify the implementation details for each possible approach, and swap them in depending on which approach I take. The java world tends to handle this with an ORM and a DAO tier these days, using DI to swap in the desired implementation (sigh, Java really is a soup of acronyms these days), whereas Rails developers tend to use migrations. But either way, I'm pretty much stuck with an ORM. It may be an ORM that works at a very low level, directly with objects, sql, connections, and transactions rather than through a higher level API, but it's still an ORM... (right?)
In spite of the inevitability of an ORM (I really hope I'm defining this correctly), I'm going to agree with a lot of the points made in this blog post. If I'm using SQL, I really don't like having the SQL hidden from me. And I really can't stand languages (like HSQL) that force me to re-learn a variant of SQL. ActiveRecord and Migrations are, without question, very productive, but I like to see the objects and understand very directly how they are being persisted and retrieved. I want to see the fields and methods, and I want to see the SQL. I've found that I almost always end up changing it, and it's easier to do that when it isn't all hidden from me.
Rails offers me so much that I can get over this little issue of mine, but I don't feel the same way about Hibernate. My personal experience is that if Rails isn't going to help me, and something has pushed me to use Java, I probably need to write a lot of lowish level code anyway.
If I have a model object, and I want to to persist it in a relational database, then I'm going to need to do something that persists and retrieves this object back and forth from the RDBMS, right? And if I want to retain the flexibility to switch to a different database (or different persistence strategy in general), then I'm going to some way to specify the implementation details for each possible approach, and swap them in depending on which approach I take. The java world tends to handle this with an ORM and a DAO tier these days, using DI to swap in the desired implementation (sigh, Java really is a soup of acronyms these days), whereas Rails developers tend to use migrations. But either way, I'm pretty much stuck with an ORM. It may be an ORM that works at a very low level, directly with objects, sql, connections, and transactions rather than through a higher level API, but it's still an ORM... (right?)
In spite of the inevitability of an ORM (I really hope I'm defining this correctly), I'm going to agree with a lot of the points made in this blog post. If I'm using SQL, I really don't like having the SQL hidden from me. And I really can't stand languages (like HSQL) that force me to re-learn a variant of SQL. ActiveRecord and Migrations are, without question, very productive, but I like to see the objects and understand very directly how they are being persisted and retrieved. I want to see the fields and methods, and I want to see the SQL. I've found that I almost always end up changing it, and it's easier to do that when it isn't all hidden from me.
Rails offers me so much that I can get over this little issue of mine, but I don't feel the same way about Hibernate. My personal experience is that if Rails isn't going to help me, and something has pushed me to use Java, I probably need to write a lot of lowish level code anyway.