It’s rather annoying that in 2015 the ORM (Object-Relational-Mapping) problem is still tedious to deal with. While in general terms it is a solved problem – JPA and Hibernate and similar frameworks do the heavy lifting of doing the SQL queries for you and getting stuff in and out of the JDBC transport objects – there does not seem to be any way to remove the grinding grunt work of making a bunch of beans to transport things from the data layer up to the “display” layer. It remains an annoying fact that database tables tend to be wide, so you wind up with beans with potentially dozens of attributes, and even with the best aid of the IDE you wind up fiddling with a brain-numbing set of getters, setters, hash and equals methods and more-or-less identical tests.
I would love to suggest an alternative – or build an alternative – but this remains a space where it feels like for non-trivial use there are enough niggling edge cases that the best tool is a human brain.