Interesting Recent Developments in Java Data Objects (JDO)

There have been some interesting developments in the JDO world recently. Sun's Forte 4 IDE is dropping its JDO support (which was written by the JDO Spec Lead Craig Russell and Sun's JDO team) while recommending that Forte customers use Cocobase as an alternative. Ironically, Craig and the JDO team at Sun has been re-assigned to implement the Sun One AppServer's CMP engine. Earlier this week, JDO 1.0 spec and RI were released.

The choice to drop transparent persistence support from Forte was not officially explained, although it has been noted that the Forte transparent persistence (TP) only supported JDO spec 0.5, and this played a role in it not being included in version 4. Further spicing up the drama, Forte Product Manager Dan Roberts recommended using Cocobase as an alternative. Cocobase is one of the leading O/R Mappers which is built by Thought Inc., one of the most vocal opponents of JDO on TheServerSide and other newsgroups.

Ironically, JDO Spec Lead Craig Russell and the transparent persistence team that had been working on the TP tooling for Forte, have been assigned the task of implementing the CMP engine for the next version of the AppServer formerly known as iPlanet (Sun One AppServer). In this new role, the TP team will be implementing Sun One's CMP engine using JDO, as defined in chapter 16 of the JDO spec.

Finally, JDO 1.0 spec, the reference implementation and the test compatibility kit were released earlier this week. Vendors will likely be spending the next few months completing their implementations and claiming full compatibility.

Another interesting event in the JDO world is the emergence of the website JDOCentral.com, a completely grassroots JDO portal that has been built by a consortium of JDO vendors. It is rare to see all the participants in a particular industry gang together to grow a community for their users.