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Comment by dmacvicar | Hacker News Reader

There are several examples of simple libraries in Java that makes you realize it is possible to provide solutions to problems without the "culture" that predominates the ecosystem.

For example Simple (http://simple.sourceforge.net) is a great XML serialization framework that does very well what it is supposed to do.

And there are others I haven't used, but you look at the API and think, this is what I want.

I was very impressed with jDBI (http://jdbi.org/) even if we could not use it because of Maven.

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Just had a look at jDBI and it doesn't exactly look like a simple library to me. There's a lot of run-time annotation processing.

Have a look at jOOQ if you haven't seen it yet. There is a pre-compilation stage which generates DAO for you and they can then be used with static type guarantees.

I mentioned I haven't used it, I only got the impression from the API, but you are criticizing the implementation right, not the API?

That pre-compilation step, though... How does that play with the IDE? I'm looking into various (more) modern ORM/DB-talky-to-things, and checked out jOOQ but was turned off by that pre-compilation step. I like having my errors bright and red when I type.

I also don't like code generation. I'm not closed-minded to it, just don't like it if I can avoid it.

> That pre-compilation step, though... How does that play with the IDE?

It doesn't integrate with the IDE and I am not too fond of it either.

But if you want ORM as a library in Java, I don't think there is any other option possible. Java has no meta-programming support, and annotations are going to be processed at run-time which is even worse than pre-compilation.

> but was turned off by that pre-compilation step. I like having my errors bright and red when I type.

Too bad. Once you have code generation built in your development process (e.g. combining things with Flyway: http://blog.jooq.org/2014/06/25/flyway-and-jooq-for-unbeatab...), I'm sure you'll get a hang of how things work with jOOQ, and most importantly, you'll get your errors bright and red when you type (or when you build)

I don't see any reason it shouldn't be possible to support pre-compilation steps as part of the IDE. Unless you are actively editing the bits that are compiled, it seems like this should work, but I am not an expert on what goes on behind the curtains of IDEs.

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