Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Oracle Open Sources TopLink!

Today at EclipseCon in Santa Clara, Oracle (my employer) announced that it would open source Oracle TopLink (for which I’m a product manager) as part of the proposal of the Eclipse Persistence Platform project (nicknamed “EclipseLink”).

This is big news! All the advanced features of TopLink will be available in open source for use by Java developers building any kind of Java application. Everything will be open sourced except for Oracle Application Server specific integration code that, frankly, isn’t useful to anyone outside Oracle—it’s glue code. Along with the existing ORM/JPA, OXM/JAXB, and EIS support, a number of new features that are being developed for the next release of TopLink will now make their debut in open source including:
  • Service Data Objects (SDO) implementation and SDO Data Access Service (DAS) that leverages JPA for use with SDO.
  • XR (XML-Relational) that provides a completely metadata driven approach to obtaining relational data as XML.
  • DBWS which exposes XR as a web service. With DBWS, you can easily build web services that access relational data without any programming.

For details check out the press release and the FAQ.

More on this later! I’m at EclipseCon this week and it’ll be interesting to see how this news and the EclipseLink proposal are received!

--Shaun

3 comments:

Bruno Felaco said...

Hurray! I can testify that to at least one company that was feeling forced to switch to Hibernate, that will no longer be considering that route. This is great news.

Anonymous said...

It will become next defacto ORM standard.

Shaun Smith said...

TopLink, and soon EclipseLink, is implementing various standards like JPA for ORM and JAXB for OXM so hopefully those standards will take hold in the market. Early signs are that they are. JPA interest is definitely increasing.

What I hope to see is open source innovation that adds value on top of those standards. TopLink right now has comprehensive support for caching both in a single node and in a cluster. These are outside the JPA spec but pretty important when you're building real apps.

The thing that's not readily apparent to the casual observer is that TopLink is highly extensible and will accommodate third party extensions. For example, I'm working on extensions to support JPA persistence of EMF models which will be available "real soon now" from the Eclipse EMFT Teneo project. The JAXB support was built on the same mapping core as ORM which is testament to its flexibility.

I'm pretty excited about where this is all going--but I'm biased! ;-)

--Shaun