I know there's a few Java devs here, and even though the numbers are low I'd rather as here than have d*******s like mordy on OCAU provide their 'input', if you can even cause it that >:)

So yeah, I'm working on two little projects of my own mostly because I've got nothing better to do and WoW is excruciatingly boring, and currently it stores data in flat text files. I want to modify it to store data in (for now) an SQLite database, but wouldn't mind being able to have it not tied strongly to that (it'll need to inject to MySQL for web, for example).

For that reason, and also to have a bit of experience I can answer when asked in a future job interview, are there any technologies other than Hibernate that I should consider playing around with for this purpose? Hibernate we use at work but I guess is really just a remnant of it being in place because it was what everyone did 50 years ago, but now there's better things around.

Would JPA be the way to go, or is there another direction the industry are going?

JPA seems very popular because of the upgrade path from Hibernate (it supports JPA) and it leaves open the possibility to move over to OpenJPA. But whatever comes next in 4 / 5 years, is also going to support JPA. There are a couple of nice Hibernate features you'd lose out on going straight JPA like the criteria API and interceptors, but otherwise I am reliably informed it is pretty full featured.

Theres also iBATIS and Toplink JPA impl, but I dunno too much about them.