The difference is partly a shift in my viewpoint and partly a shift in
my intentions with each email. I never changed my opinion on my support
for Hibernate, but what has changed as the discussion has grown is how
willing I am to support the alternatives.
First off, I should make clear that I don't speak for Sun, I speak for
myself and to some degree on the behalf of the team I with that is
responsible for running blogs.sun.com. My job is to run that website
and the decisions I make with regards to Roller are always influenced by
what I think is best for blogs.sun.com.
I had originally been more open in my discussion about the various
approaches that could be taken around the persistence implementation
mostly because I had for one reason or another felt that folks on this
list had already made up their mind to replace Hibernate despite my
objections. Part of me thinks that's okay and I am not entirely opposed
to an alternate approach, but as I thought about it more realistically
it seems less and less like a good idea and that's where my last email
came from.
You said that Hibernate is a thorn in your side, so you obviously you
favor replacing it, but we don't have that problem and AFAIK there
aren't any other Roller users who have complained about that. If we
don't have a problem with using Hibernate when why should we want to
replace it? I don't think there are any benefits at all for us to
replace Hibernate.
I am always open to options, but you have to tell me why we should
replace Hibernate? If the only reason is because of an issue with
apache licensing then that's not good enough in my opinion.
-- Allen
Elias Torres wrote:
Allen,
I note a stark difference between this email and one of the first emails
from you in the thread:
"""
assuming we agree that we are only focusing on implementing one of the
options, we then need to decide which one. just so it's known, i think
it's entirely lame that we are getting rid of Hibernate over a silly
licensing issue. as a large roller customer i consider it more of a
pain than a benefit to have to replace the backend. regardless of that
fact, it appears that's what everyone wants to do, so i consider
Hibernate to no longer be an option. that leaves JDO and JPA as you
mentioned, and i don't really have any preference between the two. """
Now it seems that the *only* option for you (is it for Sun, too?) is
Hibernate. Is that correct? Why the change of opinion? If I may ask.
-Elias
Allen Gilliland wrote:
I still want more information about the soft vs. hard dependency issue
WRT Hibernate being part of the project, but whatever the outcome of
that is doesn't change the fact that I continue to support Hibernate as
our implementation.
I should also say that depending on how this works out this is something
that could put us (blogs.sun.com) at odds with the community and
encourage us to go our own direction.
My only concern is for my installation of Roller at blogs.sun.com and as
I've said before, switching to something other than Hibernate is only
going to create problems for us. As far as I'm concerned Hibernate
still offers the best option as the persistence implementation and since
the licensing issue does not affect us specifically then I don't see any
reason to mess with it. At some point we will likely be willing to try
a JPA implementation, but we are not really interested in being one of
the first adopters, so that won't happen for a while.
Depending on the outcome of the soft vs. hard dependency issue and
whether or not apache will provide us some potential way to continue
using Hibernate legally is what will determine my final point of view.
-- Allen
Dave Johnson wrote:
On 8/16/06, Anil Gangolli <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I support Elias's option #2 with some concessions to #1.
I feel about the same way.
On the question of "who here wants to replace Hibernate?"
Hibernate's LGPL licensing is incompatible with Apache policy and
there exists a set of contributors who are willing and able to provide
an alternative backend impl. I'm a member of that set. If we create an
alternative, it works well and we've got consensus then we'll ship it
with Roller. Do we have to do this before we graduate? I sure as hell
hope not.
On the question of "which ORM should we choose?"
I definitely believe we should ship one ORM with Roller and the Roller
project should not do anything to promote, document or support the
idea of users plugging in alternative ORMs.
Personally I favor JPA because 1) there will be multiple high-quality
implementatons (some at Apache) and 2) Hibernate is one of the
implementations. So we'd ship OpenJPA or something similar, but folks
who *really* want to continue using Hibernate can figure out on their
own how to configure Roller to use Hibernate's JPA implementation.
On the question of "Data Mapper good or bad?"
I'm +1 on Data Mapper. The Data Mapper pattern allows us to abstract
ORM queries, just as our Persistence Strategy allows us to abstract
ORM load/save operations. We'll have a complete persistence
abstraction, something I've always wanted to see. The ability to
compare JPA, JDO and possibly other ORMs seems like a key feature
right now. Having named and externalized queries is nice too.
- Dave
