RE: [OJB-developers] [Fwd: [New Subproject Proposal] ObjectBridge ]

[Bischof, R. <rai...@ed...>]

Sure, go for it. The reason is simple: Jakarta => excellent reputation =>
more users & developers => better code quality. 
And that's what we always need! The bigger the user base the faster you
stabilize the code of new feature sets.

The few bits I provided for OJB in the caching area are of course approved
for migration to the new license.

Rainer


-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas Mahler [mailto:tho...@ho...]
Sent: Mittwoch, 1. Mai 2002 00:42
To: ojb
Subject: [OJB-developers] [Fwd: [New Subproject Proposal] ObjectBridge]


Hi all,

I had been contacted by Jason van Zyl (from Jakarta Turbine project)
some time ago. He was looking for an opensource replacement for their
"homegrown" persistencelayer Torque.

They made some tests and found OJB to be sufficient for their needs.
Jason was impressed by the flexibility and overall feature-set of OJB
and suggested that OJB should become an official jakarta project.

I met Jason on monday and we had a discussions on the pros and cons of
becomimg a Jakarta project.

we found several pros:
- Jakarta is a very well known OS initiative (even my boss has heared of
it ;-)). It has a great reputation to host first class opensource
software. being listed at jakarta would bring even more momentum behind ojb.
- we would attract more developers and contributors.
- the BSD style licence will it make more attractive to contibute back
to OJB
- users will have less headaches to choose a well reputed Jakarta
software than choosing some "insecure" and "never-heared-of-that-before"
stuff from the web.
- jakarta provides some support for marketing etc.


We did not find any cons, but we have to care for some details:
- Moving to Jakarta would require to change the license on all code to
the Apache license. All developers that have contributed to OJB must
consent on this. If someone does not want his or her stuff under the
Apache license we would have to rewrite those parts.
- there are some coding conventions (not very restrictive ones) required
   for jakarta projects.


I think that becoming a toplevel jakarta subproject will be a very good
thing for OJB in the long run. So I'm definitely voting to do this step.

What do you think? Any objections? Do you see any problems wrt. to
licensing or something else?

below you'll find Jason's proposal to the Jakarta project committee.

cheers,

Thomas

---
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [New Subproject Proposal] ObjectBridge
Date: 29 Apr 2002 07:27:46 -0400
From: Jason van Zyl <jv...@ze...>
To: tho...@ho...

Thomas, this is the message I would like to send to the Jakarta list.
Please feel free to make any changes you wish and when you are happy
with this I will send it to the general jakarta mailing list.

<a href="mailto:gen...@ja...">Jakarta
General</a>

---

Hi,

I would like to propose ObjectBridge
(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

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
jv...@ap...

http://tambora.zenplex.org








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