JavaBoutique has published an interesting interview with Bruce Tate: Interview: Bruce Tate on the “Politics of Persistence”. (I’m not sure if this is a new article, I can’t find the publish date anywhere. This is actually number 3 in Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003: Undated Content.)
Bruce has some good advice on which frameworks to use for ORM:
I typically tell a customer to start with the simplest possible solution. The simplest is JDBC…The most important of the JDBC-wrapping frameworks called iBATIS… The iBATIS framework differs from the typical object relational mapping framework in that you’re mapping to the results of an SQL query instead of a relational schema… If iBATIS isn’t enough, I try Hibernate… If Hibernate isn’t enough, I move to something like JDO… Now there’s also the emerging EJB3 standard… is a merger of EJB and JDO into a combined persistence specification.
But ORM frameworks don’t mean you don’t have to know anything about databases:
Making the conscious decision to isolate yourself from the work of writing code is different from isolating yourself from understanding the details of the relational database… You can use Hibernate effectively because you understand what’s going on under the covers.
He also gives his opinion about Toplink and the future of persistence frameworks. Worth a read.
July 27th, 2005 at 18:18:39
Frankly, Bruce Tate’s opinions on persistence are worth about as much as mine on bird-calling, and I can’t tell a sparrow’s call from a nuthatch
. He clearly has biases which are not based on fact. If he was being truthful and calling it as it was then he would he would have stated that:
- JDO is a dead end technology in terms of a standard and is headed towards living in the open source world. Recommending people to use it is akin to a programmer deciding to develop using only deprecated APIs.
- Oracle acquiring TopLink has not caused customers to be afraid of being locked in, but on the contrary TopLink popularity has grown incredibly and still growing. People were happy that TopLink had a home in a big company that was not going away. Database independence is something that TopLink has taken pride in from the beginning and would never change. Why would anybody shrink their market and tick off existing customers in the process?
Funny, he has been spouting this silliness for three years, now, and even though others have moved on he still can’t seem to come to terms with certain realities. How many more years it will take, Bruce?
July 27th, 2005 at 22:59:59
I think that’s a bit harsh, he does have good points, although i agree with your position on JDO. Especially his statement that EJB 3 will add credibility to JDO products doesn’t make sense. Well, it may add credibility, but it will not do them a lot of good. If EJB 3 is as good as JDO, why use JDO? Oracle for example, is implementing EJB 3 persistence based on Toplink. I see this as a good thing for Toplink and EJB 3. I don’t see how this is going to benefit JDO.