Hi Sal, I'm the lead developer of iBATIS for Java and the original creator of iBATIS.
I don't think you have anything to worry about, as I believe that iBATIS.NET has a bright future and will possibly even surpass the success we've seen on the Java side. iBATIS for Java has a lot more competition with products like Hibernate and Spring JDBC as serious competitors. Furthermore, Java application best practices are more compatible with typical ORM solutions like Hibernate. In the .NET world, there are very few ORM options (NHibernate, LINQ to SQL...), but more importantly a lot of .NET project consider stored procedures to be a best practice. Since day one, iBATIS has supported stored procedures as a first class feature. While ORM tools may be "compatible", they certainly weren't designed with that as a primary goal. In fact, it doesn't even make a lot of sense to map a representation of state (a class) to a behavior (a function or procedure). iBATIS handles this by design, as a core consideration. One reason you might not see a lot of activity on the development side for .NET is that it was more feature rich than iBATIS for Java out of the gate. Gilles did a great job porting the framework, but also introducing a number of new features that iBATIS for Java still doesn't have. So naturally, for the last while you've probably only seen bug fixes and the odd feature. In my opinion, this is a great success of iBATIS. Our software has survived the test of time and continues to be chosen over the competition with very few changes. We aren't running a race or trying to keep up with any artificial specifications. We just continue to do what we do, and do it well. That said, both Gilles and I (and the rest of the team) are working on version 3 of the .NET and Java versions respectively. With the introduction of C# 3 and with greater adoption of Java 5 (finally), we are now able to leverage some of the cool new features they offer. So worry not. iBATIS has been around for 6 years now, it's not going anywhere. :-) Cheers, Clinton On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 7:52 AM, Sal Bass <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I was just wondering when we can expect the next major release of > Ibatis.NET? I was also curious to know if there is a definite future for > Ibatis.NET, as it seems development is much more active on the Java front. I > want to bring Ibatis into our organization, but the CTO has concerns on > whether .NET releases will be supported and active for the foreseeable > future. > > ------------------------------ > E-mail for the greater good. Join the i'm Initiative from > Microsoft.<http://im.live.com/Messenger/IM/Join/Default.aspx?source=EML_WL_+GreaterGood> >
