I came across a blog in which the author seems to be convinced that ORMs are indeed a part of the past. In his opinion, ORMs are misleading. While they help you in getting up to speed fast and prevent you from writing noisy boiler code; over time, they will pose problems. Those problems, he says, will become bigger than the speed advantages that you’ve gained.

http://codemonkeyism.com/orms/

But there are others that think that ORMs still have an important role to play. Here’s someone who feels that although none of the ORMs in the market today are without their pains, one needs to know their internals in order to make them generate efficient queries. An understanding of all the nuances is a must in order to make better use of their caching behaviors. More importantly, you need to manage all the reams of jars that they come with. Read what he has to say:

http://java.dzone.com/articles/are-orms-really-thing-past