Data Services by Erix.: May 2009

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

JPA 2.0 almost here

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/05/jpa20

Typesafe API for queries, for those reluctant to use strings.
Metamodel API.
Bean Validation (JSR #303)

Thursday, May 21, 2009

What's new in Microsoft Data Services

http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/ten-slides-from-whats-new-in-microsoft.html

Granite Data Service 2.0

New version of this Data Service technology, with support for Google Apps and JDO:

http://graniteds.blogspot.com/2009/05/whats-new-in-graniteds-200-rc1.html

Microsoft is still on the path to full persistence, with the introduction of POCOs and Design first approach (top down with schema generation) in this version (among several important new features and enhancements).

Sneak preview of new features here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/

and here

http://blogs.msdn.com/efdesign/default.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2009/05/11/update-on-the-entity-framework-in-net-4-and-visual-studio-2010.aspx

JDO 2.3

New features of JDO 2.3, by Andy Jefferson of DataNucleus:

http://java.dzone.com/articles/whats-new-jdo-23

Introduction to Data Services

http://www.infoq.com/articles/narayanan-soa-data-services

I agree with the preliminary definitions and rationale at the beginning of the article, but I'm not so sure about the Development section. In particular, I don't think the "contract-first" approach is promoting reusability of data services. It could be nice if you just intend to consume data services only from a single applications, but it does not sustain an enterprise approach.

This sems to enforce the purely static vision of data services, the one traditionally coming from orchestration, BPM vendors, etc.

The future of MySQL?

I don't know how MySQL will evolve after Oracle acquired Sun.

The Open Database Alliance seems to be an open source community supporting independent branches of MySQL, led by some of the historical contributors.

For sure, many customers will hesitate about MySQL in the coming months before clarification from Oracle and others. Could this create space for another open source database player?

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/05/mysql-open-database-alliance

Monday, May 18, 2009

New version of EBeam

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=54593

New features:

In-memory filtering and ordering: that's something already avalaible in best ORM products;
Autofetch queries based on query execution statistics. That feature is really the nicest of EBeam. It was on Xcalia XIC roadmap but we never developped it. I would love to see it added in DataNucleus.

Friday, May 15, 2009

NeoDatis 1.9 released

I think I've already mentioned that new ODBMS before. This new version has interesting features such as Groovy support (I love Groovy), Scala support, Google Android and pluggable encryption.

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=54588

Interesting to see that the upcoming DataNucleus 1.1.3 will support this new NeoDatis version.

Once again, it seems that the Cloud, SaaS and Data Services are boosting the market for new specialized databases.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

JDO's not dead?

Seen on Matthew Adams' blog:

http://blog.matthewadams.me/2009/05/jdo-support-spreads-for-good-reason.html

I cannot agree more. Interesting to see how this things will evolve.

I've even seen one Oracle document mentioning their JDO implementation, coming from the acquisition of BEA (who acquired SolarMetric a while ago). They simply said you can choose between JPA and JDO. See Oracle's document titled Oracle WebLogic Server: a solid foundation for SOA, June 2008, page 9. When we see how they fought against JDO around 2003, that's a huge move.

In an ideal world, JPA should have just been the ORM part of JDO. Maybe the JDO expert group should have relaxed some of the technical constraints so that Hibernate and TopLink could have found it suitable (mostly byte-code enhancement, binary compatibility plus few other minor things). After discussions with Oracle and Hibernate the JDO expert group was willing to do it, but in the meantime both Oracle and Hibernate convinced Sun to start JPA as part of EJB3.