Ebean is an open source "Object Relational Mapping" toolkit for Java that is simple and agile.

ORM toolkits give you a way to query SQL databases using Java statements that automatically load, save and update databases through your Java objects (which are transformed into database proxies).

Ebean was originally created to provide a simpler alternative to JPA (Java Persistence Architecture) ORM implementations such as Hibernate and EclipseLink. It was designed to allow faster coding, easier maintenance, beautiful clean code and create the ideal interface between your Java code and SQL data.

The JPA standard usually proves too complex for today's agile development environments and was designed by a committee composed of competing ORM vendors and JEE market players.

Ebean's objectives are to:

Provide an ORM toolkit that is much faster to learn, code against and maintain.
Support developers in their quest to create beautiful clean, concise code.
Use programming abstractions that increase safety while providing maximum performance.
Be nothing more than a thin layer over databases and not get in the way of developers.
Make sure SQL remains a first class citizen when developers want to use it.

If you are familiar with JPA you will notice that Ebean provides a much cleaner "sessionless" API and a simpler query language with:

No Session Object (or UnitOfWork or EntityManager).
No Attached or Detached Beans.
No merge(), persist(), flush(), or clear().
You can load objects with raw SQL if you want.

Ebean has been in production for 5 years and is pre-integrated into the popular Play framework.

Take a look at the code demos showing how Ebean is used.

Examples

Demos. A few lines of code are worth 1000 words

Quick start

Quick start. Have code running in 10 minutes

It's about simplicity and agility

Community Support

Professional Support