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.