My developers are waging a civil war. In one camp, they’ve embraced Hibernate and Spring. In the other camp, they’ve denounced frameworks – they’re considering Hibernate though.
The question is: Are there any nasty surprises, weaknesses or pit-falls that newbie Hibernate-Spring converts are likely to stumble on?
PS: We’ve a DAO library that’s not very sophisticated. I doubt that it has Hibernate’s richness, but it’s reaching some sort of maturity (i.e. it’s not been changed in the last few projects it’s included).
I’ve used Hibernate a number of times in the past. Each time I’ve run into edge cases where determining the syntax devolved into a scavenger hunt through the documentation, Google, and old versions. It is a powerful tool but poorly documented (last I looked).
As for Spring, just about every job I’ve interviewed for or looked at in the past few years involved Spring, it’s really become the de-facto standard for Java/web. Using it will help your developers be more marketable in the future, and it’ll help you as you’ll have a large pool of people who’ll understand your application.
Writing your own framework is tempting, educational, and fun. Not so great on results.