Q:

recommendations for firestorm dao replacement

I have taken over some code that has been using the Firestorm DAO code generator from CodeFutures. I believe that the license for this is going to be up soon, and was wondering if anyone could recommend any alternatives, open source or not, so that I can get an idea of what's out there to better make a decision.

A:

One option would be to completely change directions and go with a persistence framework like JPA. You create your Java object model, add the appropriate annotations, and JPA handles everything else for you without any messy generated code.
Granted, depending on the specifics of your architecture and business situation this kind of change might not be feasible for you. However if you can manage it, JPA seems to be much more in line with current best-practices for Java persistence.
I've used OpenJPA in a production environment: http://openjpa.apache.org/
And we considered TopLink (Oracle's implementation) but ran into a few issues that I can't recall. http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/toplink/index.html

