I loved iBatis the moment I used it (some 8 years ago or so). And yet I always felt like a black sheep because I liked working in SQL and also liked my "ORM" to

I loved iBatis the moment I used it (some 8 years ago or so). And yet I always felt like a black sheep because I liked working in SQL and also liked my "ORM" to be a simple translation engine for results into a data structure that can then be used by Java. So I was happy to see this author come to the conclusion that iBatis is A Good Thing, but I do wonder if we are still black sheep in a flock of Hibernate/JPA enthusiasts.