Turns out my entry from yesterday wasn't showing up because I violated the rules: I typoed the filename and called it "020226.txt", which made BlogMax think it wasn't current and thus not show up anywhere or get reposted. This is a fragile web I weave.

I've been doing more work with Cayenne both at the day job and at home. I'm liking it more and more as I get used to it. It definitely has a good role in a Servlet environment as it can do smart (ie lazy) fetching. You get an object out of the database and you have a reference to an object related to it. Until you use the other object, it doesn't actually pull it down and then it smartly keeps it around after that. If the data underneath changes, it gets it again otherwise it doesn't. You never touch the database, just the objects. I keep hearing about various other Java based O/R layers (Object Relational) but really, they're all mostly the same. Whatever works is fine with me. If another is just as good but no better, I'll stick with this. If the other thing gives me something of value, I'm happy with that too.