How can JDO's rejection be "a victory"?

Don's been running with this meme started by Ted Neward about how OR/M frameworks are like the Vietnam war: tons of wasted resources and no clear exit strategy. Don has posted several times about this, clearly coming down on the side of the anti-OR/M folks. One of the reasons is that there are so many frameworks, so many developers chasing the same goals, throwing resources after the same problems, butting up against the same laws of diminishing returns.

Which is why I don't understand how the fall of the JDO 2.0 spec in the JCP is a "victory". The JDO 2.0 spec would have standardized the platform and, I think, brought the overall number of competing frameworks down somewhat. As the big JDO suppliers (both commercial and opensource) solidified around an accepted standard, there would be fewer and fewer open source OR/M frameworks springing up all the time. At the very least, the big boys would have a central sandbox to play in. Without the endorsed spec, we are left pursuing a lot of individual agendas and waiting to see what happens when EJB 3.0 finally makes it onto paper.

What I'd really like to see is the JDO 2.0 spec win the reconsideration ballot and get some real community momentum behind its various implementations, which would in turn keep the pressure on the EJB 3.0 team to create a workable replacement for CMP (or, more preferably, just a plugable facade behind which we can place whatever already working data layer we want).

Get In Touch