EclipseLink Summit 2010 Wrap Up

Last week we held our first EclipseLink Summit here in Ottawa with attendees from Canada, Germany, India, and the US. The principal goal of the summit was the exchange of technical information and ideas. We believe the event was a tremendous success!

We spent 2 days with committers leading technical sessions discussing areas from high level components and architecture to the detailed workings of EclipseLink's querying, caching, transactions, management, diagnostics, metadata processing, JPA 2.0 metamodel, and several other subsystems.

We would like to extend a big thank you to all of the committers who lead those sessions. The preparation time invested was obvious and the quality was amazing. We know it was tough to squeeze this additional work into your hectic pre-Helios schedules. The feedback from all attendees was excellent.

On the 3rd day of the Summit we focused more on the project itself. Starting with a talk from Jeff McAffer (EclipseSource) on OSGi and Eclipse RT technologies. We then discussed EclipseLink and OSGi, documentation, development process, build, testing and our road map planning.

While not all of these sessions allowed us to come to concrete conclusions the discussions were great and will hopefully carry on in our weekly committer meetings where we continue to improve our processes and refine our direction.

For those interested a more detailed summary of our Thursday sessions will be published to the eclipselink-dev@eclipse.org mailing list and topics requiring further discussion will be added to the weekly meeting agenda.

Thanks again to all the presenters and attendees. We are all looking forward to future EclipseLInk Summits where we can gather committers, contributors, and and users to share ideas and grow our community.

Your Summit Program Committee

Doug Clarke, Peter Krogh, and Shaun Smith

EclipseLink Summit 2010

In an effort to increase the community of committers and contributors with in-depth knowledge of EclipseLink we have decided to host a 3-day Summit. The goal of this Summit will be to exchange detailed technical information and discuss future direction for the project and its persistence services.

All interested parties are welcome to participate.

More info on Summit is available here.

Doug

EclipseLink in Galileo: Persistence at your fingertips

The Eclipse Galileo release signifies another important milestone for the EclipseLink project. The Galileo release makes EclipseLink 1.1.2 available and easier to use for the entire Eclipse community. Developers using the Java EE or Modeling Tools distributions of the Eclipse IDE will find EclipseLink included and available for use in Equinox OSGi, RCP, EMF, Java EE, and Java SE applications.

The EclipseLink 1.1.2 release includes a comprehensive set of persistence services:

• EclipseLink JPA: Java Persistence API support for object-relational mapping with many advanced mapping, performance, and scalability features targeting Java EE, Java SE, and OSGi usage with Equinox specific extensions.
  
• EclipseLink MOXy: Object-XML Binding (JAXB) support including advanced mappings, meet-in-the middle mapping without annotations, and pluggable parser support for optimal performance.
  
• EclipseLink SDO: Service Data Objects 2.1.1 reference implementation including a Data Access solution for integrating JPA entities with SDO.
  
• EclipseLink DBWS: Database Web Services solution enabling the generation of JAX-WS services based on relational metadata harnessing EclipseLink's JPA and MOXy capabilities.
  

EclipseLink for Java Developers

EclipseLink's inclusion in the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers combined with the extended support in WTP's Dali Java Persistence Tools project allows developers to start building JPA enabled applications quickly and easily. The Dali integration allows developers to optionally select EclipseLink as their JPA implementation and have it automatically added to their project classpath. This support along with Dali's rich validation and intelligent code assist provide a highly productive environment for developing, testing, packaging, and deploying JPA enabled applications.

• WTP Dali News & Noteworthy
  
• EclipseCon 09: Building your First JPA Application with Dali JPA Tools
  

EclipseLink for Modeling

The Eclipse Modeling Tools package of the Eclipse IDE includes the EclipseLink JPA feature and Teneo's EMF/EclipseLink integration. Teneo's EclipseLink support provides tools to generate JPA mappings from an EMF model or simply map their EMF models to a relational database. It also extends EclipseLink JPA with transparent runtime support for persisting EMF models. This out-of-the-box support for JPA persistence for EMF models will simplify the development of RCP and Equinox applications that leverage relational databases.

EclipseLink for RT

The EclipseLink project is also available as part of the Galileo update site under the EclipseRT Target Platform Components allowing developers to leverage P2 for provisioning of their Equinox (OSGi) environments. The provisioning allows developers to select the persistence services they require; JPA for object-relational, MOXy for Object-XML binding, or SDO for Service Data Object usage and have the necessary bundles downloaded and setup in their target platform environment.

• Galileo In Action - Runtime Showcase
  
• Eclipse Freshman Project #5: EclipseLink
  

Please download Galileo and try out the new EclipseLink capabilities. Provide us feedback on your experiences through our newsgroup.

The EclipseLink Team

SDO 2.1.1 (JSR-235) Releases with EclipseLink as the Reference Implementation

I am happy to announce that SDO 2.1.1 (JSR-235) has been approved by the JCP, and EclipseLink SDO is the reference implementation.

EclipseLink Download
http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/downloads/

Reference Implementation Download
http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/downloads/ri.php

SDO is a generic structure to represent data from many sources such as XML and relational databases, most commonly associated with SCA.
http://wiki.eclipse.org/EclipseLink/FAQ/WhatIsSDO

EclipseLink SDO was implemented as a thin layer on top of EclipseLink's object-to-XML layer (which is also the base for EclipseLink JAXB). EclipseLink SDO can be used alone, or as a means to expose POJOs as DataObjects so that components like EclipseLink JPA and JAXB can be used.

Accessing Relational Data as SDO DataObjects using JPA
http://wiki.eclipse.org/EclipseLink/Examples/SDO/JPA

Converting POJOs to/from SDO DataObjects using the POJO/SDO Bridge
http://wiki.eclipse.org/EclipseLink/Examples/SDO/JAXB

Thank you to all of the EclipseLink committers that contributed to the SDO component.

New EclipseLink Logo

We have wrapped up our EclipseLink logo contest and we have a winner.



Thanks to everyone who submitted a logo, commented on the submissions, or voted for their favorite. You can see the image in use on the home page.

www.eclipse.org/eclipselink

Doug

EclipseLink 1.1.0 Released!

I am happy to announce that EclipseLink 1.1.0 is now available for download.

There are some useful links off of the download page including a 'getting started page', and the 'release notes' for 1.1.0.

As well as bug fixes, 1.1.0 introduces feature enhancements in the following areas:

DBWS
The first release of EclipseLink DBWS allows developers to easily and efficiently expose database constructs (tables, SQL, stored procedures).

JPA
EclipseLink 1.1.0 JPA support is extended to introduce:

• a new 1:M mapping that doesn't require a back pointer or a separate join table to hold the associations.



• TABLE_PER_CLASS Inheritance has been added giving greater flexibility in how your relational tables associate with the classes in a hierarchy.

SDO
This release of EclipseLink includes an implementation of SDO 2.1.1 (JSR 235). This implementation conforms to the final draft and is being included with the final draft as the reference implementation.

Peter Krogh and Doug Clarke

EclipseLink at EclipseCon

EclipseCon is fast approaching. It occurs between March 23 and March 26. There
are a number of sessions that would be of interest to EclipseLink users.

There is one tutorial:

• Developing Java EE Web applications with JSF Facelets and JPA (Monday, March
  23 @ 8 AM)

Four talks:

• Preparing Java EE 6 development environment with Eclipse and GlassFish v3
  (Tuesday, March 24 @ 10:10 AM)
• Harnessing JPA 2.0 with Eclipse (Tuesday, March 24 @ 1:30 PM)
• Building your first JPA application with Dali JPA Tools (Tuesday, March 24 @
  4:30 PM)
• Teneo--Integrating EMF & EclipseLink for Model-Driven Development with
  Persistence (Thursday, March 26 @ 2:30 PM)

Two BOFs:

• Pimp my Persistence (Tuesday, March 24 @ 7:30 PM)
• Runtime Technology at Eclipse (Tuesday, March 24 @ 8:45 PM)

We hope to see you there.