“Oracle has just announced from EclipseCon that it is donating the TopLink O/R persistence framework to the OSS community. This is a fairly substantial contribution of code.”
Here are some info on the framework.
When you are using Oracle as your backend, you really might want to prefer Toplink over Hibernate. From the house of Oracle (at least after all those buyouts), it obviously has lots of support for Oracle database. On the other side too, it looks like it has a stable caching and lazy loading mechanism than Hibernate. People have used Toplink against other databases in Production environment and they just say it performs slightly better than Hibernate.
“If you are using the Oracle DB then support for hints, hierarchical queries, XDB XML Type with query constructs, Object-Relational database types with queries, many SQL extended function and types (TIMESTAMP*, NCLOB, …), excellent support for complex stored procedures and functions, as well as support of Virtual Private Database will definitely be key factors in your comparison.” (source : oracle.com)
Toplink has been in the market for over 10 years now. But what stopped it from becoming popular? Struts had better documentation whereas Webwork had a better framework. Same is the case with Toplink. Lack of good documenation initially and the cost involved in buying Toplink (Toplink was, of course, commercial initially) were the top things that were stopping Toplink from becoming popular. Now that Toplink has good documentation and become opensource, what’s stopping us?
Tags: o/r mapping, opensource, oracle
