API-based queries

I'm a big fan of API-based queries. Even though I really appreciate query languages (e.g. SQL), the impedance mismatch of using them inside your favorite programming language is too high, even more when you're dealing with dynamically generated queries. So much string manipulation is really error-prone.

So I really like approaches such as Lucene's or Hibernate Criteria API. However, API-based approaches are normally low-priority (above all when dealing with SQL), so standards like JPA doesn't even have such an API and in Hibernate it is far more limiting than HQL, and issues like this are real showstoppers.

Update: typo