[news.eclipse.technology.ejb-orm] Re: arent there now 2 official EJB3 Pr

[shaun.smith@xxxxxxxxxx (Shaun Smith)]

Christian Sell wrote:

> Maybe this is the opportunity to explain what exactly is the difference 
> between this project and the jsr220-orm project, which was also accepted 
> recently? The only difference I can see is the already contributed code 
> and the participants..

The differences between the two are quite significant.

The EJB-ORM project is building lightweight native (SWT, EMF, etc.) 
Eclipse tooling that will target the EJB 3.0 reference implementation and 
will be usable with all compliant runtimes.  It is being designed to slip 
into the WTP to provide seamless support for EJB 3.0 Entities alongside 
the existing WTP EJB tooling.  It will also support out of container (JSE) 
development.  It will be vendor neutral and to make sure, it is being 
developed through a collaborative effort of the three of the most active 
players in the EJB 3.0 space (measured by involvement on the EJB3 expert 
group and EJB3 product development): Oracle, SolarMetric, and JBoss.  
Other participants are welcome and we hope others will participate but it 
is significant that at this point these three are involved.  I should also 
emphasize that the scope of this project is JSR220--that's it.

I'm sure that someone from Versant can lay out the features of their 
proposal but they will admit that, in a nutshell, they are converting 
their existing Swing based JDO tooling to support EJB3 and Eclipse.  In 
their proposal and creation review slides they say they will support 
JSR-220 and JSR-243 and they might look at other mapping technologies like 
XML and SDO mapping.  Their scope is much wider than only JSR-220.

I think that with the focus clearly on JSR-220, multi-vendor involvement, 
and an approach designed to leverage existing native Eclipse frameworks, 
the EJB-ORM project should produce some excellent tooling for Java 
developers regardless of what EJB3 runtime they choose.

--Shaun