title: How can I make Java back-end development faster? Or can I?
body: <p>I started web programming with raw PHP, gradually moving on to its various frameworks, then to Django and Rails. In every framework I've used, pretty much everything I need to do with a database (even involving relatively complex things like many-to-many relationships) could be taken care of by the automatically generated database API without much work. Those few operations that were more complex could be done with straight SQL or by tying together multiple API calls.</p>
  
  <p>Now I'm starting to learn Java, and it's confusing me that the language celebrated for being so robust for back-end infrastructure requires so much more code (doesn't that mean harder to maintain?) to do simple things. Example from a tutorial: say you want to search by last name. You write the method in the DAO using Hibernate query language, then you write a method in the Service to call it (couldn't that be automated?), then you call the Service method from the controller. Whereas in any other framework I've worked with, you could call something to the effect of</p>
  
  <pre><code>Person.find_by_last_name(request.POST['last_name'])
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Straight out of the controller - you don't have to write anything custom to do something like that.</p>
  
  <p>Is there some kind of code generation I haven't found yet? Something in Eclipse? Just doesn't seem right to me that the language regraded as one of the best choices for complex back-ends is so much harder to work with. Is there something I'm missing?</p>