Wednesday, March 19, 2008

EclipseLink RI of JPA

Seen this article about Oracle's EclipseLink being the RI of JPA on TSS.

Difficult to track Oracle's strategy about persistence... What the hell, are the differences between TopLink, TopLink Essentials and EclipseLink?

Is EclipseLink available outside of Eclipse? Or is it the Eclipse equivalent of TopLink Essentials, the one embedded within GlassFish? Why Sun would push an Eclipse-based component as an RI of a JSR? Now Sun has its own competitive open source stack (Solaris, Java, NetBeans, GlassFish and MySQL) what will happen to their historically strong relationship with Oracle? What Oracle will do with Kodo and AquaLogic Data Service Platform? Will they drop them, try to merge them? These are important pending questions.

Why JPA is the only standard with so many "official" RIs (Kodo, Hibernate, Eclipse)?

Anyway, there are certainly some very positive points in that announcement:

  • Oracle is going on the open persistence way, you know the one not limited to RDBMS. That's the right way to go, initiated by Xcalia and Castor, and followed by JPOX.

  • To that extent, I'm curious to see how they envision the evolutions of JPA, which is, by design, tightly coupled with RDBMS until now.

  • The bridge between JPA and SDO seems very important to me. It seems to me this is also what SAP is pushing, and also IBM. BEA was not working in this direction until now (Kodo and ALDSP being fully seperated, except one experience which has been described in this blog), interesting to see how things will change in the coming months.


On all these points Xcalia has been a clear pioneer. It is nice to see big players following the same approach.

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