Alan posted a link (http://ufies.org) with a link to someone's blog entry about OOP not being the be-all-and-end-all methodolgy.
I basically agree with what he says. That sort of reaction can be expected from programmers used to creating quick practical solutions using more procedural/hybrid languages like Perl.
I always found the use of relational-object mapping rediculous. Why read a record from a table (eg Animals) into an object (Animals) and create a whole slew of getters/setters for getName(), setName(), setWeight(), getWeight(), etc when SQL already does that for you? Business rules can still be enforced with the database. Using things like data binding makes it simple to map into user interfaces.
Mapping XML data into in-memory objects is just more silly.
I believe that people need to start looking forward. The past had procedural, object, and data focused methods of programming. The future is going to be process driven. Think about it - the reason most RDBMSs exist is not to store data, but to implement some business process.
See this for a good read:
http://www.bpmi.org/bpmi-library/2B6EA45491.workflow-is-just-a-pi-process.pdf
--Wim
See also BPML