It would not have had to be the vietnam of computer science. There are essentially two approaches at interacting with RDBMS: - "Top down", domain-model centric

It would not have had to be the vietnam of computer science. There are essentially two approaches at interacting with RDBMS: - "Top down", domain-model centric, hierarchical, object-oriented, etc. - "Bottom up", relational-model centric, relational, etc. We've also nicely summarised this on our page here: http://www.hibernate-alternative.com http://www.hibernate-alternative.com ORMs solve the first approach pretty well. ORMs have never claimed to solve the second approach. But people are lazy and constantly looking for magic bullets, which is why they are trapped by thinking that ORMs should also be a solution to the second approach. But even Gavin King always stressed the fact that one shouldn't use Hibernate for everything.