sampa : colin’s blog

This is pretty big news. Back in November, BEA acquired SolarMetric, makers of the excellent KODO JDO persistence library. I’ve always had a lot of respect for Kodo JDO, as it’s very performant, is very flexible in terms of mapping complex schemas, has excellent error messages, and comes with good tools and excellent documentation. Now BEA have announced, as described in this dev2dev article, that they will be putting out an open-source JPA (Java Persistence Architecture, the persistence half of the EJB3 spec) implementation based on the KODO engine.

For Java developers, this is great news. We already know that the JPA reference implementation, being produced by Oracle, is not going to be a toy; apparently the core engine is 95% based on TopLink, a very capable product. Hibernate has been including JPA preview code for a while. So now, with this addition, by the time JPA is fully finished as a spec, developers will have a choice of at least 3 very capable products, Open JPA (what the BEA Kodo based project will be called), the reference implementation, and JBoss’s implementation, based on the Hibernate engine. Developers can choose the best tool for the job, based in performance, flexibility, general quality level, and product license.