Technical Beef -

I open-sourced and published today this java persistence library that I've been developing and using for some months now.
Although I started working on it after switching from hibernate to something lighter for a project where memory footprint was an important constraint, I started using it on most of my projects, and was happy enough with it to share it as open-source.

The key points of the library are

• JPA-Annotation based. Although it's not JPA at all, it uses a subset of JPA annotations to describe the java/sql mapping. I just hope people won't be misleaded to think this is a JPA library.
• SQL: I like SQL, I deeply think it's an amazingly powerful query language, and I've always been reluctant to using something else (read: HQL). The point is that I like to test some of my complex queries in my MySQL workbench, and just copy-pasta them in my java project, and that's something really easy to do with plain SQL.
• No XML. Yurk, I really wanted to avoid using it. I couldn't switch back to iBatis because of it. Now that iBatis 3 has annotations, I guess most of my reluctance should fade away, but I also like the idea of using standard JPA annotations, and have my business objects be compatible with both JPA and UpFrost (provided I stick to the subset).

There's nothing disruptive in this library, but it gathers all the concepts I like, and excludes all the painful stuffs that degrade my productivity (XML, but I also stopped fighting with HQL joins).

Because I wanted to avoid writing a website, I used the maven "site" feature, and although I wish there were an out-of-the-box support for docbook or some other standard documentation format (rather than this apt thing), the feature is handy to use and flexible enough to let me customize the layout the way I wanted. The maven site:deploy is the killer feature, imho, it deploys the whole site to a remote server with a minimal amount of configuration work.

Anyway, here's the site: http://www.upfrost.org