Thanks. Mark.
To answer which one is faster.
Since most orm using
java reflection to populate the data. It is slower than to manupilate the result set directly. Then again as Mark said, orm can do optimization for you.
personally, I do not htink that you need hibernate or ejb2.0/3.0 if your program has no heavy load, not distributed, and it dosn't need transaction, data concurrency and integrity.
For read-only data, I prefer ibatis.