I'm looking at ORMs for Java and Active Objects caught my eye. Apparently, it was inspired by Rails' ActiveRecord. Based on what I've read, this approach seems to solve a lot of problems with existing Java ORMs by embracing convention over configuration.
What's been your experience with it?
Be careful that you don't wander into "silver bullet syndrome"... I just hear devs saying "convention over configuration" and think it's a great thing...
Daniel Spiewak is a solid programmer, I've learned a lot from his blog, but this is a fairly simple API. That means, don't expect a ton of experience with production usage, working in a high-load environment, etc. But sometimes, all you need is simple, and well, there are other projects, like Databinder that integrate with Active Objects. (Wicket + Databinder is a pretty nice, lightweight web framework for Java.)
But, for example, I'd stay away from a persistence framework like this if I was doing a lot of batch processing. Mostly, because I want:
COPY
I've solved a lot of DB performance problems by just writing straight SQL code, replacing the use of an ORM that wasn't suited for the task.