On 09/04/2009, at 7:26 AM, Robert Zeigler wrote:
> I've always considered specs like JPA to be, well, a bit of a pipe
> dream. Once upon a time, I thought I cared about the ability to
> switch between persistence providers. But then I realized that, no,
> actually, I really don't. Persistence is an area where you choose a
> provider based on differences from rather than similarities to other
> providers. Even having an opportunity last year to do a significant
> amount of work with a (largely) JPA shop didn't really change my
> perspective; they still found areas where the spec wasn't enough,
> where they had to lean on hibernate-specific features. At that
> point, the "happy promise" of "switch providers anytime" is broken.
> So, I'm with Andrus: let's not be afraid to adopt /good/ ideas in
> other frameworks, but also forge ahead where we're strong.
I'm still unsure why anything has to be done about this now within
Cayenne. Yes, there is a 80% JPA solution in there. Many people use
bits of it: lifecycle events, EJBQL, etc
I'm not clear what would be removed or why anything would be removed.
What not just change the documentation to reflect the fact that the
JPA is not a current goal but there are plenty of parts of it which
are implemented which will make migration from other frameworks
simpler (but not automatic). For example, we have lifecycle events
which match the JPA but we agree they aren't all the ideal. So we
could add more, but still leave those existing hooks in place for
people coming from a tool where they are supported and where they
don't want to rewrite too much code.
JPA is a useful marketing moniker. It will help (sometimes) get
Cayenne across the line with management in some organisations just by
having a section of the docs that discusses it, even if ultimately the
development team don't use any part of it.
JPA pages on the Cayenne site make up 2.14% of page views (not
including javadocs) but are less likely than other pages on the site
to be the last page a reader looks at before leaving (that is, they
tend to go on to read other parts of the site).
Ari Maniatis
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