Hibernate Developer Wizard

The Ruby on Rails development pattern of using good naming conventions while designing a database schema and then automatically generating a CRUD application (the automaticly generated scaffolding code is easy to modify and/or replace, BTW) is compelling. The architech of Jaffa (which I have been using a lot in the last 6 weeks) was telling me that they have code in progress to do the same sort of reverse engineering of a database schema.

The new Hibernate Tools contain a wizard for reverse engineering a database schema and for automatic generation POJO files and cfg.xml Hibernate files - exciting stuff! For now, this is an Eclipse plugin, and I have not been using Eclipse much lately (sort of addicted to IntelliJ). It would be great if eventually these tools were also wrapped as custom ant tasks (and/or command line tools). [Update: reader Max pointed out that the tools do have ant wrappers - the latest version that I downloaded was packaged as Eclipse plugins but a tools jar that is included is independent of Eclipse - my mistake.]

Hibernate supports more interesting (complex) data relationships than Ruby on Rails, but both tools taken together cover a lot of application development space.