On 09/04/2009, at 7:26 AM, Robert Zeigler wrote:
I've always considered specs like JPA to be, well, a bit of a pipe dream. Once upon a time, I thought I cared about the ability to switch between persistence providers. But then I realized that, no, actually, I really don't. Persistence is an area where you choose a provider based on differences from rather than similarities to other providers. Even having an opportunity last year to do a significant amount of work with a (largely) JPA shop didn't really change my perspective; they still found areas where the spec wasn't enough, where they had to lean on hibernate-specific features. At that point, the "happy promise" of "switch providers anytime" is broken. So, I'm with Andrus: let's not be afraid to adopt /good/ ideas in other frameworks, but also forge ahead where we're strong.
I'm still unsure why anything has to be done about this now within Cayenne. Yes, there is a 80% JPA solution in there. Many people use bits of it: lifecycle events, EJBQL, etc
I'm not clear what would be removed or why anything would be removed. What not just change the documentation to reflect the fact that the JPA is not a current goal but there are plenty of parts of it which are implemented which will make migration from other frameworks simpler (but not automatic). For example, we have lifecycle events which match the JPA but we agree they aren't all the ideal. So we could add more, but still leave those existing hooks in place for people coming from a tool where they are supported and where they don't want to rewrite too much code.
JPA is a useful marketing moniker. It will help (sometimes) get Cayenne across the line with management in some organisations just by having a section of the docs that discusses it, even if ultimately the development team don't use any part of it.
JPA pages on the Cayenne site make up 2.14% of page views (not including javadocs) but are less likely than other pages on the site to be the last page a reader looks at before leaving (that is, they tend to go on to read other parts of the site).
Ari Maniatis --------------------------> ish http://www.ish.com.au Level 1, 30 Wilson Street Newtown 2042 Australia phone +61 2 9550 5001 fax +61 2 9550 4001 GPG fingerprint CBFB 84B4 738D 4E87 5E5C 5EFA EF6A 7D2E 3E49 102A
