Graduation

Its been a big week for graduations. Earlier this week my son completed his time in kindergarden and today the EclipseLink project graduated from incubation status. Tonight I took a few minutes to finally remove the big egg from the EclipseLink home page.

As for my son, he is pretty focussed on spending every waking hour swimming until September. As for EclipseLink we are about ready to ship our 1.0 release on July 9th. In both cases it should be a fun and exciting summer.

We have been getting great feedback so far on EclipseLink and I would like to invite the entire Java community to download EclipseLink and try it out. We are eager to get your feedback and continue to expand the usage of our project.

Doug

EclipseLink in the News

Pretty exciting day so far at EclipseCon. We have been involved in two press releases at the conference so far.

Eclipse Announces EclipseLink Project to Deliver JPA 2.0 Reference Implementation

• Read more on the EclipseLink Team BLOG

Eclipse Announces New Runtime Initiative around Equinox

Ian Skerrett discusses this announcement and its implications. This announcement has a couple effects to the EclipseLink project. First off it provides a new top level project for us. We will move from the Technology project to the newly created Runtime project in the near future. This also formalizes our relationship with Equinox. We will soon be checking in our work to enabled EclipseLink's effective use in an OSGi environment.

Now that we have these announcements out I am looking forward to spending more time talking to other attendees about their work and how EclipseLink may be of use in their projects and applications.

Doug

Testing EclipseLink JPA applications in JavaSE

I spend part of my work days writing examples and helping users debug issues. I spend the majority of this time using JPA with our TopLink and now EclipseLink's advanced features.

One little piece of code I always find myself looking for is a way to take a JPA persistence unit configuration and use it in JavaSE without changing it. The idea is that my persistence unit which should run in the container should also be testable easily outside.

In the past I posted some examples of using XML to accomplish this but the following is the Java code that I use in my JavaSE examples and unit tests without going down the road of a separate persistence unit definition in XML for both worlds.

import static org.eclipse.persistence.jpa.config.PersistenceUnitProperties.*;

...

Map properties = new HashMap();

// Ensure RESOURCE_LOCAL transactions is used.
properties.put(TRANSACTION_TYPE,
  PersistenceUnitTransactionType.RESOURCE_LOCAL.name());

// Configure the internal EclipseLink connection pool
properties.put(JDBC_DRIVER, "oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver");
properties.put(JDBC_URL, "jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1521:ORCL");
properties.put(JDBC_USER, "user-name");
properties.put(JDBC_PASSWORD, "password");
properties.put(JDBC_READ_CONNECTIONS_MIN, "1");
properties.put(JDBC_WRITE_CONNECTIONS_MIN, "1");

// Configure logging. FINE ensures all SQL is shown
properties.put(LOGGING_LEVEL, "FINE");

// Ensure that no server-platform is configured
properties.put(TARGET_SERVER, TargetServer.None);

I can then create my EntityManagerFactory using:

Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory("unit-name", properties);

The only remaining struggle I have is specifying which classes are my entities. The simplest way is to explicitly reference them in the persistence.xml or an associated orm.xml file. If they are listed explicitly then I do not need to worry about the automatic discovery.

EclipseLink does support automatic discovery of entity classes in JavaSE but you need to enable its usage using:

<persistence-unit name="unit-name">
<exclude-unlisted-classes>false</exclude-unlisted-classes>
</persistence-unit>

Hopefully having these snippets of code and XML handy will help some of you out and now I can easily find them wherever I am working.

Doug

Java Search Engine Integration for EclipseLink JPA

The creator and primary contributor to Compass has taken the initiative to provide support for using EclipseLink (www.eclipselink.org) with Compass. I hope to find the time to build an application that illustrates the use of the two projects but thought I would post some early information to the community about the integration.

See the documentation


Compass is described as:

Compass is a first class open source Java Search Engine Framework, enabling the power of Search Engine semantics to your application stack decoratively. Built on top of the amazing Lucene Search Engine, Compass integrates seamlessly to popular development frameworks like Hibernate, [and now EclipseLink] and Spring. It provides search capability to your application data model and synchronizes changes with the datasource. With Compass: write less code, find data quicker.

For those of you interested in adding richer search capabilities to your JPA applications you can now combine the capabilities of Lucenewith EclipseLink JPA through the Compass integration.

Cheers,

Doug

EclipseLink 1.0 Milestone 1: Now Available

We just made our first milestone build available for download. See the EclipseLink team blog for more information.

This is an important step for our project. Our plan is to produce monthly milestone builds as we work toward our 1.0 release. It does seem very odd to be starting back at a 1.0 release after over 10 years of shipping this Java persistence solution. For those familiar with TopLink this milestone is the complete capabilities from the Oracle TopLink 11gR1 Technology Preview 2. Since we were near completion of our development cycle for this release the new features available are complete and well tested.

We are also in the process of publishing the complete documentation from Oracle TopLink as the EclipseLink user manuals. This will be done on the wiki. This in conjunction with the evolving set of examples should help developers easily evaluate the use of this project.

Any and all feedback is appreciated. There is a newsgroup and users mailing list where feedback can be provided.

All information on the EclipseLink project can be found linked from our home page.

Cheers,

Doug

EclipseLink Update: Source Checked in and team Blog

See the EclipseLink team blog for regular updates on the project.

Doug

Its alive...

I am just heading out on vacation this morning and wanted to update the community on our progress in the Eclipse new project process. We have completed our initial incubation provisioning of the Eclipse Persistence Services Project (EclipseLink).

We now have our home page up (www.eclipse.org/eclipselink) with a wiki home and developer mailing list.

We are initiating the Eclipse Parallel IP review process to get the TopLink source and test case contribution into the subversion repository in the near future. This process of re-packaging and organizing the source has been very interesting.

In the coming weeks we'll get the source code in and builds and testing working. We'll publish our roadmap and focus on building new features and a strong community. Stay tuned....

Doug