[Objectbridge-developers] [ANN] OJB 0.1.98 released

[Thomas M. <tho...@ho...>]

Dear ObJectBridge enthusiasts,

I'd like to inform you about the latest OJB release.
The new release contains three major enhancements:
1. ODMG Collections and DMap are now fully implemented
2. The PersistenceBroker now provides a transaction API.
   A transaction can be started with
PersistenceBroker::beginTransaction(), aborted with
   ::abortTransaction() and commited with ::commitTransaction().
   Usage of this transaction mechanism can improve overall performance
by a factor of 3 - 4.
   Distributed transaction against multiple RDBMS are not yet managed
properly
3. 1-n relations can now also be implemented with Arrays. OJB does now
provide a rich set of
   choices for implementing 1-n relations:
   - Java Arrays,
   - Java Collections
   - ODMG Collections
   - user defined Collections implementing the interface
ManageableCollection

Here is a list of all changes from the release notes:

New features:
- Now all Collections required by ODMG are implemented:
  DSet, DBag, DList DArray
- The DMap ODMG persistent map is now also implemeted.
- added support for using arrays to model 1-n relations.
- new method RsIterator::releaseDbResources() can be used to free
  the JDBC resources used by the RsIterator objects
- added OJBSearchFilter from OpenEMed project (credits to Sascha)
- Use JAXP Parser factory to create SAX Parser
- Transaction support in PersistenceBroker

changes, refactorings:
- proper handling of ClassNotPersistenceCapableExceptions
- PersistenceBrokerImpl::getObjectByQuery() now also works with
QueryByCriteria
- move package examples to package test
- removed quoting of column names

Open bugs:
- Testmethods in test.ojb.odmg.OdmgExamples still report failures.
  in my development environment (VisualAge) I can't reproduce them...  

More information is available at http://objectbridge.sourceforge.net

I have interesting news for all that are in doubt if OJB's dynamic
architecture is fit for prime time applications:
One development team in my company made a performance comparison between
TOPLink and OJB. Their tests were based on batch oriented scenarios,
that have to do a lot of insert and update work.
OJB (using the new transaction API) was about 20% faster than TOPLink!
Not bad for a 0$ product ;-)

David is thinking about providing JTA transaction support. This will
help to integrate OJB in complex distributed applications.
I'm planning to implement the OQL Query language in one of the next
releases. This is the last feature missing for full ODMG compliance. 
I'm also planning to build a servlet based server around the
PersistenceBroker. This will allow to run OJB as a server and to run
multiple clients from physically separated machines against OJB.

If you have any ideas, comments, additional features or want to
contribute some code, don't hesitate to contact me.

thanks,

Thomas