Does anyone else's brain just hurt trying to build relationships in Exposed DAO? When to use

referrersOn

, when to use

referencedOn

? What's wrong with

hasOne

,

hasMany

? The DSL syntax is so much cleaner, but isn't really an ORM. Why a class and an object? And why do I only have to set up the relationship between two tables on three of these?

Referrers take on an attribute from another entity type, where that entity should match the current entity’s id. References take on an attribute from the current entity, and checks for a match to another entity’s id. The DAO sample shows this, though I do also find it confusing at times. I ultimately went with DAO because building all these relationships through the DSL involved a lot more code. Class is for the entity and object is for the table logic. I think this makes sense, and even if it were one class you’d need to have a companion object since tables are not part of an entity.

I am getting the hang of it. I've managed to make relationships between 5 tables. I'm sticking with DAO because I prefer its query syntax. I'm curious to compare a lines-of-code count with Exposed DAO, Exposed DSL, and something more traditional like Hibernate/JPA.