I've got to admit, I'm itchin' to start using the JDK 5.0 features. I
want to see how EJB3/Annotations stack up against the Hibernate/XDoclet
setup I've been using for years now in various projects. And I'd love
to check out Xzajo's new
Hibernate plugin for Netbeans 5.5. But I can't do that at work because Roller is still stuck in JDK 1.4.2 land. I can development, test and deploy using JDK 5.0, but we're still keeping the Roller code-base 1.4.2 compatible. Sigh.
And that reminds me. Hibernate itself is becoming something of a
plugin. Why? Because Hibernate is providing an implementation of the Java
pesistence API.
For example, if Roller used the Java persistence API instead of the
Hibernate API, we could eliminiate our Hibernate dependency
and
still allow Roller users to continue to use Hibernate. We'd be coding against an API with
multiple implementations: the Hibernate EJB3 implementation under the LGPL, the Glassfish EJB3 implementation under the CDDL and
someday the Geronimo EJB3 implementation under the Apache license.
We could plug-out Hibernate and plug-in something else. Plus, we be waving good-bye to JDK 1.4.2 -- a very nice side-effect.