about.html

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group: about
meta-description: Overview
hero: true
hero-title: It's about simplicity and agility
hero-sub: Born out of necessity
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        <p style="font-size: larger"><strong>Ebean is an open source "Object Relational Mapping" toolkit for Java that is simple and agile.</strong></p>
        
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            <p>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).</p>
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	    <p>Ebean was originally created to provide a simpler alternative to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Persistence_API">JPA (Java Persistence Architecture)</a> ORM implementations
	    such as <a href="http://www.hibernate.org/">Hibernate</a> and <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/">EclipseLink</a>. It was designed to allow faster coding, easier maintenance,
	    beautiful clean code and create the ideal interface between your Java code and SQL data.</p> 
	    
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	        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.
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	    <p>Ebean's objectives are to:</p>
	    
	    <ul>
	       <li>Provide an ORM toolkit that is <em>much faster to learn, code against and maintain</em>.</li>
	       <li>Support developers in their quest to create beautiful clean, concise code.</li>
	       <li>Use programming abstractions that increase safety while providing maximum performance.</li>
	       <li>Be nothing more than a thin layer over databases and not get in the way of developers.</li>
	       <li>Make sure SQL remains a first class citizen when developers want to use it.</li>
	    </ul>
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	       <p>If you are familiar with JPA you will notice that Ebean provides a much cleaner "sessionless" API and a simpler query language with:</p>
            <ul>
                <li>No Session Object (or UnitOfWork or EntityManager).</li>
                <li>No Attached or Detached Beans.</li>
                <li>No merge(), persist(), flush(), or clear().</li>
                <li>You can load objects with raw SQL if you want.</li>
            </ul>
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		<p>Ebean has been in production for 5 years and is pre-integrated into the popular <a href="http://www.playframework.com/">Play</a> framework.</p>
		<p><em>Take a look at the code <a href="demo-some-simple-queries.html">demos</a> showing how Ebean is used.</em><p>
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                    <a href="demo-some-simple-queries.html">Examples</a>
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			<div class="panel-body"><a href="demo-some-simple-queries.html">Demos. A few lines of code are worth 1000 words</a></div>
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		            <a href="quick-start.html">Quick start</a>
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            <div class="panel-body"><a href="quick-start.html">Quick start. Have code running in 10 minutes</a></div>
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