News
At JavaOne, some deal with data
- By Jack Vaughan
- March 25, 2002
Hello, JDOCentral! Sun, Poet Software and other vendors
working in the Java data vineyard have launched http://www.JDOCentral.com to
serve as an interactive Web community for educating users about Java Data
Objects, a means of improving on the more basic Java data handling capabilities
now offered with JDBC. The news became public at the JavaOne conference
in San Francisco.
There are indications that there is a crying need for
something like JDO,
whose goal is to act as a common API for Java persistence.
'EJBs [Enterprise JavaBeans] have had a huge problem with
[maintaining object data] persistence,' said Dirk Bartels, president and CEO at
Poet Software. He adjudged that container-managed persistence methods for EJBs
are 'not very well liked,' and are somewhat more geared toward relational
database needs, rather than the requirements of Java
objects.
'The impedance mismatch sort of breaks the system,' he
said, using an
analogy from electrical engineering.
Microsoft has offered ADO, as an architecturally enhanced
upgrade of its ODBC middleware, for a number of years. Some viewers might hold
this is late in the game to come up with an enhancement to Java that is similar
in some ways. 'JDO overcomes issues people have today,' said Bartels. 'I don't
think it's too late in the game.' For its part, Poet's FastObjects group will
include JDO-compliant APIs in
all its FastObject 2002 products.
About the Author
Jack Vaughan is former Editor-at-Large at Application Development Trends magazine.