What Now for JDO?

The EJB 3.0 expert group seems to have handed JBoss the EJB application server market on a silver platter. Several weeks ago at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas the EJB expert group announced its decision to shelve the current entity bean architecture and focus on the lightweight persistence of Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs). Specifically, it decided to use Hibernate as the persistence mechanism in EJB 3.0. Hibernate is an open source object/relational mapping solution that joined the JBoss Group last year. [...] IBM and Oracle are two major players in the EJB app server space that one would expect to be at least leery of the EJB 3.0 expert group's choice. However, as database vendors also, they probably prefer Hibernate to JDO because it uses the SQL syntax of the underlying RDBMS—which allows applications to be locked in to a specific database vendor. Members of the JDO community suspect that JDO's portability across databases—preventing vendor lock-in—is a primary reason for IBM and Oracle opposing JDO. Maybe these vendors are willing to concede a portion of their application server market share to JBoss in exchange for having applications locked into their underlying database systems. [...] Given the market impact this will have on all the other EJB app server vendors, I doubt this Hibernate decision will withstand the tests of time and politics. David Jordan, on DevX.com

David Jordan is a member of the JDO expert group and, as such, views the move as politically motivated and questions the technical merits of this decision.

Personally, I was about to revaluate JBoss because I am likely to have to deploy a J2EE server soon and I have no budget for software - so at the risk of being 'short-termist', I'm reasonably pleased with this development. I guess JDO still has a future of sorts, but it seems it has just lost a lot of ground in potential adoption in J2EE.