IT-eye

The part of Toplink which implements JPA, Toplink Essentials, was already open source, and part of the JEE 5 reference implementation, but today Oracle announced that it will completely open source Toplink (pressrelease ). Toplink not only implements JPA, it also support JAXB, SDO and JCA, which means that it’s a pretty complete persistency solution. Oracle is also increasing it’s contribution to Eclipse, by joining the board of directors of the Eclipse foundation, and by creating an Eclipse project called Eclipse Persistence Platform based on Toplink (FAQ (pdf)).

What does this mean? That Oracle is still focusing on the open source part of the Java world. They are not converting a lot of java programmers to JDeveloper and ADF, with ADF being tied to JDeveloper. Instead, open source java programmers are targeted through Eclipse, by adding all the Oracle technologies that may interest 3gl java programmers this IDE.

It also means there is less of a barrier to use Toplink extensions on projects. I always prefer to stick to the standards whenever possible. But JPA does have some missing pieces, which Toplink, but also Hibernate, fixes by included some non standard functionality. Support for stored procedures is one example. In the past I’ve hesitated to use these extensions, because it limits you how you can distribute your application. For example, we have a development server virtual appliance we use on most projects, which includes version control, bug database, build server, etc. This is all based on open source, because it allows you to take it to all your customers. Now we can include applications based on Toplink in this vmware machine.