Hibernate

Hibernate is an open source object/relational mapping tool for Java. Hibernate lets you develop persistent classes following common Java idiom - including association, inheritance, polymorphism, composition and the Java collections framework.

Hibernate not only takes care of the mapping from Java classes to database tables (and from Java data types to SQL data types), but also provides data query and retrieval facilities and can significantly reduce development time otherwise spent with manual data handling in SQL and JDBC.

Hibernates goal is to relieve the developer from 95 percent of common data persistence related programming tasks.