Hi all, The high traffic in the JDO mailing lists in the last days might indicate that some implementations may join JPOX soon as JDO 2 compatible. This might be a good time to start a discussion on the day after JDO 2.0. In my opinion in order to survive as live technology and not end up like ODMG 3.0 - JDO 3.0 must extend JPA. I think that as an extension to JPA there is a good chance that JDO will be able to be attractive again to Java developers, even more than it was in the good days 2-3 years ago.
By visiting the forums in http://jdocentral.com these days or by comparing "jdo" to "ejb3", "hibernate java", etc. in http://trends.google.com anyone can see that an urgent action is required in order to save JDO. We do have some very important assets: advanced technology, several good quality implementations, happy users (not as much as we want but still something), the Apache umbrella, the specification and the TCK, and of course Craig and all the other wonderful people. Therefore, I believe that an action now can bring JDO back to business. Probably most JDO vendors (that have not done so yet) will implement JPA in the future. But I am not talking on saving vendors but on saving JDO (even though it could also help the vendors eventually). Sooner or later these vendors may focus their products on JPA rather than on JDO that will remain behind. If, however, JDO 3.0 will extend JPA in some way - we might be in a similar position as Hibernate and Toplink that also support their old API in addition to the new JPA API, with the advantage that our extensions are standard and backed by multiple implementations including both relational databases and object databases (plus some unique powerful features such as JDO 2.0 fetch groups). Maybe some JPA issues can be excluded. But in my opinion at least supporting the new API (e.g. deprecating makePersistent and adding persist, or supporting both as in java.util.Vector since JDK 1.2) is a must in order to survive. Maybe some support should even be added in JDO 2.1. If this direction is accepted - rethinking might also be required regarding the new support of Java 5.0 based JDO annotations. I believe that even taking a decision in this direction and publishing it - may change the momentum for JDO. Any comments will be welcomed. Regards, Ilan Kirsh ObjectDB Software http://www.objectdb.com
