Just as a FYI about me,
I'm a self-employed consultant, and I've currently got two clients.
The first one is an online gaming service (turn-based
space-strategy/diplomacy, 16-players-per-game) I implemented where the
server is written in WebObjects 5 and OpenBase. Originally prototyped in
Visual Basic and Access at customer's request, but thankfully out of that
phase! http://www.intelgames.com
The second one is an electric utility where I've implemented and deployed an
online billing and payment processing system (http://www.gvebill.com) in
WebObjects 5.0 and Oracle. For political reasons, I've been asked to
"consider" migrating it to Struts back in March (ironically right after the
system was presented at an Ebill Conference as an example of how to produce
a ebpp system with record low costs and ahead of schedule). The actual
migration (the "consider" turned out to be an order, not a request) started
in the middle of August.
I originally chose Toplink as our database layer out of Toplink, Oracle
BC4J, SimpleORM, Hibernate, Expresso, and Cayenne based primarily on
information found at
http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?ObjectRelationalToolComparison
and
http://www.uq.net.au/~zzabergl/simpleorm/ORMTools.html
I'm now reconsidering that decision because a) Toplink supplies source, but
only at the interface level, not the implementation level as previously
thought, b) There's no visible user community presence or any online
presence other than Oracle documentation and one not-altogether-favorable
user experiences web page:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TopLinkForJavaUsageExperiences, c) The GUI mapping
tool is interface bloatware -- it's easier to write the model files by hand
or convert them from a different modeling tool, d) may not be as reliable as
expected based on previously-mentioned reviews, and e) has poor in-depth
documentation.
Cayenne seemed promising at the time, but there were too many unknowns on
the ObjectRelationalToolComparison chart at the time and no optimistic
locking. I think you should make it a priority to keep the
ObjectRelationalToolComparison as up-to-date as possible as it seems to be
becoming one of the primary sites where people go to investigate and compare
database layer productions. You might also try to provide more info for the
ORMTools.html page as well.
Now that I can load my EOModel, I'm going to give Cayenne a try.
[Another side project I may start soon is the port of PopOver to java.
It's taken a year or so, but Jason finally gave me the source yesterday! No
reason you Mac OS X people should be the only ones with a decent email
client!]
And, yeah, I'm becoming another Eclipse user. Too bad I can't find the
equivalent to WO5 ProjectBuilder's "Project Find Panel" so I can do global
find-and-replace operations. :-(
-Mike
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