AutoSQL provides a simple and easy to use framework meant to be a substitute for J2EE Entity beans and JDO. It can ease the mapping of Java classes to database tables. All you need is a working knowledge of Java and JDBC to be able to use AutoSQL.

I wrote AutoSQL because of the trouble I was having using J2EE entity beans. When I first read about entity beans I thought "Wow!" that's a really neat idea. But after trying to develop a system using J2EE, it seemed that entity beans were the most useless piece of the framework. They work well when dealing with a single row of the database. But try to do an operation on a bunch of them and performance is dreadfully slow. EJB-QL was added to allow more control over what query was executed on the backend, but it lacked many simple features like ORDER BY and such. While I understand the benefits of fully seperating the underlying database from the application, how many times do you usually change database vendors? So what exactly is wrong with a little SQL in your application as long as it's done properly. Another issue I have with the entity bean implementation is the reliance of external XML files to provide the mapping between object and database. At first this seems like a good idea, but it get's to be a hassle keeping the "schema" in multiple locations (database, xml, java). It seems a much better idea to just keep it in the source code so that future modifications to the schema can be done quicker without having to go between source files. I can't count how many times I've had problems because of simple spelling mistakes.

AutoSQL works well with large results set as long as you don't mind loading all of the data from a query into memory. Another feature is the SQLReadOnlyObject which works well with table joins. Imagine doing a query that joins 10 tables. The only way to use entity beans would be to use BMP, which you end up writing the SQL anyway. A SQLReadOnlyObject can easily represent rows returned from any query.

There are things that this framework does not cover yet. The first is caching of objects. When you select an object it always goes to the database. This may change in the future. It also doesn't support the J2EE framework yet. I do plan on adding this to it soon, but I'm not sure as to what form it will take. This framework also will not help when using more than one database. The systems I have worked on haven't needed this feature so for me it isn't a big issue.