I gave up (temporarily) on OJB and began working with Hibernate. Hibernate is very slick. Once you define your mapping, POJO and config its a breeze to use. The learning curve isn't all that steep either. It took me only a few hours to get things going. In fact, the only problem that I hit was that the instructions for Hibernate have you place JAR files in the WEB-INF/lib directory that are duplicates of files that Tapestry uses (and has you place in the shared/lib directory). The only thing I don't like about it so far is the query language. Its way too SQL like. I'd rather see a pure object oriented aproach to queries like OJB and some others have.

After setting it up I decided to write a chapter for the Tapestry tutorial on hooking the two together. For an early preview you can grab it from this link TapHibTut.doc. You'll also need theHibLib.zip source code file.