Shameless plug : for a little while now I've been working on a project with others to try a different approach. We use a higher level abstraction that does a better job of modeling the data than language-level objects. This eliminates the impedance mismatch. Because it's not language dependent you can use the same models (we call them "logical objects") with multiple languages.

The logical objects are hierarchical and serialize easily to JSON and back, making it simple to write REST interfaces. There are a couple of production teams making good use of it.

Github repo is here; feel free to contact me about it: https://github.com/zeidon/zeidon-joe