jdbc without hibernate

I have been working on a project using jaxb;
this was relatively pain free.
The next part was very, very painful -
mapping the objects into the relational model.
I decided to use plain jdbc for this, and I can
definitely state that this is a bad way to
go.
for persisting my 96 classes,
I have about 1,400 lines of code, all of
which is very fragile, totally dependent on
small detail of data typing, xml structure.
If we redefine anything in the database:
recompile
If we redefine the xml schema: disaster will
strike.

I am going to have to try to convert this
to hibernate, but I was unsure of my ability
to handle all the mappings when the manually
defined database was constantly changing.

I was afraid to take two steps forward; I tried to
take one step, but I think this was a mistake.

Maybe I should have tried:

jaxb and jdo