[Objectbridge-jdo-dev] Re: OJB-JDO Implementation

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

Hi Michael,

thanks for you interest and your offer to help!

Michael Azzi wrote:

> Hi Thomas,
> 
> First I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart
> for the great job that you are doing in leading such a worthy endeavor. 
> I have been following the slow and agonizing progress of the JDO 
> specification since its early days. And the one thing that bothered 
> me the most in this whole JDO process, is the lack of a decent open 
> source implementation that could quickly propel JDO into mainstream
> adoption. 


Yes there are so many commercial tools around that claim to support JDO 
already (don't know about their quality) but no open source projects.
CASTOR claims to have a JDO implementation. But their "JDO" has not much 
in common with SUN's JDO (apart from the name ;-))


> JDO was in dire need for such an implementation as it tries to compete for
> the
> mind share of the developers against other well entrenched technologies 
> such as all these proprietary O/R mapping tools, and CMP entity beans. 


One of my main reasons to launch OJB was my disliking of the EJB entity 
beans concepts. (that's why "OJB" sounds so much like "EJB").


> Now why didn't I start an open source project to do just that, you
> might ask. It's simply because I lacked the expertise in the area
> of transparent persistence, and also due to time constraints on my
> part.


Yes it's really a lot of work !!!


> It is such a welcome relief to see that someone is working on that
> very thing. And I am willing to offer all the support that I can give
> within my limits to make sure that this project is successful, and delivered
> on time. I have extensive experience in server side java development, and
> I think I can put some of that experience to some good use on this project.
> 


That's great! Every helping hand is most welcome!
Have you already read my Proposal 
(http://objectbridge.sf.net/jdo/jdo-proposal.html) and registered to the 
mailinglist?


> On a more technical note, I am wondering if you are contemplating providing
> a connector adaptor for your JDO implementation, that will allow it to be
> integrated with all compliant app servers.


Yes, we should do this. That's still lacking in OJB.


> The other question that I have is, will there ever be support  for LDAP
> servers 
> as data stores in this JDO implementation, instead of RDBMS.
> Just the way Castor DAX once did it. Or is this too much of a distraction
> at this point.


In the early days of OJB I once stated that I want to have it focused on 
  O/R mapping and nothing else.
I believe it was a good decision to get OJB started.

But more and more people are contributing code.
And more and more people are requesting new feature like LDAP integration.
Thus I believe its OK to integrate such features.

(In fact there have been succeful  efforts in my company to reuse the 
OJB abstract query syntax to represent LDAP queries.

The OJB PersistenceBroker API is abstract enough to allow simple LDAP 
implementations. This will integrate smoothly into our overall concepts.)


So, how to get you involved? you should

- register to the jdo-dev mailinglist (all our communication goes 
through this list)
- study the discussions in the mailinglist archive
- read the jdo spec (I guess you know it better than me)


Currently the work is not very well organized. But that is no problem at 
this early stage. We discussion design issues, organization issues, 
documentation concepts, etc.

feel free to comment on these posting. You might also share your ideas 
on how we could get the job done.

Thanks,

Thomas