iBATIS, the SQL based ORM will finally be getting a book length treatment. It’s a pretty simple mapping framework that relies on good old SQL. We’ve used iBATIS frequently in the past several years and we continue to use it for connecting to our legacy system over using Hibernate.
Our issue is that we use a JDBC driver to connect to our legacy system, that behind the scenes is really not a relational database at all. In order to do anything but queries we have to wrap the call in a stored procedure syntax since it’s really calling programs on the mainframe and not accessing the persistence store directly. With iBATIS being SQL based we just have to setup the mapping file from the input and output parameters.
ibatis is nice (the sqlmap stuff, not the dao framework–i use spring’s instead), but the book doesn’t look like something i’d pay money for. Looking at the TOC i don’t see anything of interest that isn’t in the online docs already.
Hmm, using stored procs to access mainframe apps. I’m familiar with this strategy, specifically JDBC calls to Stored Procs bridging to RPG. Curious to know how much experience you have with this integration technique. I know I’ve always found it to feel hackish and yet work surprisingly well.
On using stored procs to access mainframe apps, we’re about a year into it now. It actually stinks because it’s pretty inflexible, but there really isn’t a better option right now. So it’s worked well enough.
We may migrate over to using web service calls at some point, but who knows.