Non-ORM layers over JDBC

Hi all

I'm fairly new to Java (sorry!) and struggling with the database access 
area. My PostgreSQL database is fairy complex and significant parts of 
its user interface are through stored procedures etc. I've been looking 
into Hibernate / Hibernate EntityManager and other EJB3-compatible 
tools, but they all seem to be oriented toward database-independence and 
using the DB as a dumb storage engine. They even implement their own 
outer joins (!) and other core DB functionality. Currently I'm trying to 
figure out why a "SELECT c FROM customer c;" (Hibernate-style) is 
introducing a WHERE clause for on the customer's bank_id when executed 
.... so I'm not impressed so far.

However, I've also looked at raw JDBC code, and it seems to be very 
verbose with a lot of manual data conversion and little language 
integration.

I'm somewhat spoiled by having come from C++ with TrollTech's Qt, a 
toolkit so good that it makes C++ not only worth using but even nice. It 
has SQL-enabled widgets with a lot of programmer control, and a very 
nice and well integrated SQL interface that doesn't impose too many 
weird limits or force you to work around your SQL access layer to do 
simple things. It makes good use of variant types and conversion 
operators to minimise the amount of manual type wrangling the programmer 
has to do.

I've done a fair bit of searching but haven't found any sort of JDBC 
over-layer that integrates database access into the Java language a bit 
better but without all the ORM database-independence stuff.

What do people here use? Just use the JDBC directly? Use an ORM layer 
even though you just target PostgreSQL and work around its limitations 
and quirks? Use a different ORM layer without weird limitations and 
quirks? Some other tool I haven't been able to find out about?

I'm writing a pretty ordinary desktop app, but I was really hoping to 
avoid writing vast amounts of database interface code even for the 
simpler parts of the interface, as appears to be necessary with direct 
JDBC use.

Comments on what you're using or would like to have used would be very 
much appreciated.

--
Craig Ringer

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