To some extent, I don’t have a problem with JPA which inevitably needs an implementation such as Hibernate. However, it requires configuration and ORM.
I don’t specifically like using Hibernate directly, based on the fact that it is a vendor specific approach.
Nonetheless, I’ve been preferring the usage of JDBC, and I would introduce a “personal” DAO implementation, where I open a connection as late as possible, and then I do close the connection as soon possible.
I was then confronted to a situation where going back and forth to the database on a remote machine would literally take around 60 seconds, that’s when I started giving serious thoughts about using something similar to Apache Tomcat’s DBCP, but then BoneCP was the one I adopted, eventually.
It has indeed solved many problems, as it does detect connection leaks, or the fact that a DB server is down and such.
I am not sure about the plethora of capabilities Hibernate may bring to the table, but is it sufficient to use JDBC + BoneCP for performances purposes?
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