Speaking for Shaun, as he is currently out of the office - Ideally, we
agree, it would be better to have a single EJB 3 project within Eclipse.
However, although the technology addressed is the same the approaches were
very different.
This is the first project we have lead within Eclipse and in our
discussions it was clear that a key element of success was community
support.
To get community support, it was important that the project wasn't a
direct port of the TopLink Mapping Workbench to Eclipse and that the
project was not tied to the TopLink runtime. We based the project proposal
on vendor-neutrality that leveraged technical expertise and not a specific
implementation. This is the key element that we felt differentiated our
approach from the other proposal.
The fact that two of our competitors, JBoss and SolarMetric, are
participating on this project is an indication that they certainly are
comfortable with the vendor-neutral approach. Along with being the leaders
in the ORM space, the 3 companies also are primary contributors to the EJB
3 expert group. The Kodo, JDO, Hibernate and TopLink communities are well
represented on this project.
We welcome all feedback and suggestions and invite anyone who is
interested in participating in this project to contact us including
individuals that are interested in this technology area.