Integration between Rails ActiveRecord and Java Hibernate

Question

Greetings to you: let me “develop a concept” a bit here: I participate in the mantaining / extension of the application, the functionality of which is distributed between several servers. For example, we have a machine running ApplicationServer, another on a DataServer, etc.

This application has a web interface. The current user interface is fully implemented in Java and thus makes it easy to add new features. One of my goals is to extend this interface, and we are considering moving all this to another platform, such as Rails.

The problem is that the database that the user interface manages (possibly Rails in the future) is also being processed by ApplicationServer (Java).

So, my main question is: both Rails and Java can access databases through their own ORMs (ActiveRecord for Rails and Hibernate or similar for Java). Is there a way to guarantee consistency of mappings? *

Even if the answer is a hard no, I would also like to hear your thoughts on how you approach this scenario.

Hope this question is clear enough, but warn me if this is not the case and I will edit it accordingly. = D

* Edit: for the query, I expand this explanation: I mean, how do I make sure that everything does not break when someone needs to add a new field to the database and display Hibernate because of this? I know that Rails "guesses" that the essence of the attributes itself (which simplifies), but I was wondering if there was any "magic way" to "connect" ActiveRecord directly to the Hibernate mapping.

Answer 1

, . , Rails, , db Rails .

Hibernate , Rails , db Hibernate/mapped Java, Rails .

Answer 2

, ActiveJDBC - ActiveRecord Java, , ActiveRecord: http://code.google.com/p/activejdbc/

Answer 3

DataMapper ActiveRecord. DataMapper Hibernate , . , DataMapper , . Hibernate, , , hbm dm . Rails, , , ; DataMapper, , Hibernate.

Another idea: if you use Hibernate annotations instead of xml matching, maybe you could JRuby as a bridge to create a Ruby model from Java.

But in any case, if you have good tests, it should be obvious when a change in the data model breaks something.