Integration

Would it be possible to get a Toplink versus Hibernate (or other ORM frameworks) going here?

It seems like the explosive adoption of Hibernate and the associated popularity contest in the industry has put some of us in a position where we're constantly trying to sell the-right-tool-for-the-right-job which, at least for me, seems to disqualify hibernate a lot of times, esp when scalable persistence is a requirement. It seems to be really difficult to convince folks that the popularity of hibernate doesnt mean it's by default the right option.

I've seen at least two threads on theserverside.com about hibernate versus cayenne, and despite the amount of noise in the threads, there were a few folks making some decent points. The TopLink folks were very quiet on the threads, but I know they were reading :)

So, anyone out there have any experience comparing TopLink and Hibernate? What do you all see as the shortcomings of each, esp from a technical architecture standpoint? Are GUI tools as overrated as Gavin claims? Where's annotation support for TopLink? Is TopLink overpriced? Is Hibernate's multi-tier non-integrated caching biting anyone on big projects where persistence needs to scale, or is integrated caching overrated? Is Hibernate3 really going to fix shortcomings that TopLink already addresses in current releases? What do you all think the Hibernate crew is doing right that the TopLink crew is doing wrong and vice versa? I'm not assuming any of these questions even merit answer but just interested in some objective discussion in a forum where TopLink guys might have a stronger voice.

Take care!