In my opinion the best two are Hibernate and EOF, I think a mix between them could create "the ultimate" Object Relational Mapper... or the ultimate Business Entity Manager...?
EOF (the best BEM?)
An interesting topic for analysis could be the limits between an Object Relational Mapper and an Business Entity Manager. Some people think that Hibernate shouldn't evolve to become more like EOF, because it should aim to do one and only one thing (be the best ORM) and other people think that it would be nice to have the services that an Business Entity Manager gives you:
- automatic connection handling
- automatic transactions handling
- multiple undo levels
- real nested transactions
- client and server objects
- distributed non-transactional lazy loading
- etc,etc
There are also some people that think that a Business Entity Manager is more closer to the MDA "objective", so I think it is important to take a look at (Using Borland's ECO to develop model-powered applications for .NET) an many related articles, the specially interesting thing for me about ECO is its OCL support (that can be used, for example to configure constraints that help ensuring that only consistent data is saved into the database... it is kind of a Design by Contract for the domain model)
IMO the Active Record pattern is getting too much popularity (perhaps thanks to Ruby , but I think it leads to an anemic domain model ) and Domain Model based in Business Entity Managers is not as popular (thanks to the problems in EJB1 and EJB2) but it is important to remember that EJB is not the only way to build an Business Entity Manager, there are ways to build Business Entity Managers that are a lot more lightweight and user friendly than EJB, (just investigate more about EOF and ECO)
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