I've been meaning to look into Hibernate and Spring - they seem to be the Java tools de jour, and I'm assured by some clever people that they are very good. I've just read Object-relation mapping without the container, Develop a transactional persistence layer using Hibernate and Spring, and I think I'm beginning to see the light. Certainly looks a good deal less hastle than coding your own DAOs!

I'm still a bit worried about using LGPL software in the context of a commercial Java application, though...