Hi, I would like to propose ObjectRelationalBridge (http://objectbridge.sourceforge.net/) as a top level subproject of Jakarta.
For those not familiar with ObjectBridge it is arguably one of the most advanced persistence layers available, commercial or otherwise. It is accompanied by an extensive, current documentation set which includes a quick start guide, tutorials, a FAQ, design documentation describing how certain features of OJB have been implemented, and deployment guides. The developer community is incredibly strong and currently consists of 17 inviduals: three of whom are Jakarta committers, and one of the core Castor developers. So the project has the numbers and has displayed some collaboration with other projects. There are developers from the Torque team (the simple table->object persistence tool within the turbine subproject) too so there is obvious interest in OJB. The current list of developers can be found here: http://sourceforge.net/project/memberlist.php?group_id=13647 I would also like to note that David Taylor, a Jetspeed fellow, also contributed to the internal transaction mechanism. So again, another point of interest within Jakarta. OJB is currently being used in the Jetspeed project, and integration is well underway in the Turbine project and Thomas Mahler, the author of OJB, uses OJB in conjunction with Struts as part of some of the solutions his company provides for clients. Thomas is also a user of TopLink, which is the only product that is even remotely comparable with OJB, so he is very familiar with both and reports that OJB is on par with TopLink with to respect to performance and available features. I won't go into a complete list of features, but here are some of the features that set OJB apart: o Pluggable APIs: Currently there is the native PersistenceBroker API, a full ODMG API (which provides enhanced transaction isolation) and a JDO implementation is in the works. OJB has been designed to allow different front-end APIs for maximum flexibility. The ODMG API, for example, is a small set of classes layered over top the core of OJB. The JDO implementation will be very similiar in nature. o Pluggable query APIs: currently supported are a criteria based API (AST based mechansism), OQL and SODA. But again they are pluggable, so for example the query mechanism in Torque could easily be made to work with OJB. These two features alone make OJB attractive as different APIs can be made so that existing users of different systems can use OJB without forcing clients to change code. Trying this with Torque is going to be one of my first exercises to see how well this mechanism works. There are many tools like Torque and OJB can be made to work with the APIs of these projects so that greater collaboration can occur within OJB itself. One can take a look at the source and design of OJB and quickly determine that OJB stands in a class of its own, is very reliable, very flexible and very performant. The greatest feature with respect to development is the extensive regression testing features and the testbed. There are currently 130+ test cases and a regression test that compares the performance of OJB with native JDBC calls. A full list of features can be found here: http://objectbridge.sourceforge.net/features.html OJB also makes use of many Jakarta packages: Ant, Maven, Crimson, and Log4j. There are also plans to use more of the commons utilities where possible so the project is already Jakarta friendly :-) Another interesting note is that OJB is one of the top 100 projects on SourceForge (rank 89) with about 15,000 hits and 3,500 downloads per month. So there is a very healthy user community that complements the strong developer community. Currently the license of OJB is LGPL but in discussion with Thomas he feels that a BSD style license like Apache's is actually a better model and has no problem with changing the license if the donation of OJB is accepted by the Jakarta PMC. This is really a one-of-a-kind project, and is definitely one of the cases where an OSS implementation is close, if not better than its commercial counterpart. The developer community is keen, there are great number of users and we think that OJB would be a fabulous addition to the set of projects that are currently housed at Jakarta. -- jvz. Jason van Zyl [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://tambora.zenplex.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
