EclipseLink - Initial Impressions

As was suggested by Doug Clarke, I took a look at EclipseLink. I was actually caught a little off guard on the whole subject, as with the birth of my daughter I had pretty much gone under a rock for the past few months. EclipseLink is yet another JPA provider, but there are some interesting aspects to it:

• It was chosen by Sun Microsystems to serve as the reference implementation for Java Persistence 2.0.
• The JPA development community has essentially switched from TopLink JPA right over to EclipseLink.
• EclipseLink is bringing further capabilities with support for MOXy (JAXB), SDO and OSGI to name a few.

There are several good articles on the tool itself from the EclipseLink home page.

I downloaded the most recent release from the Eclipse website, and set about setting up my applications to use it. Generally speaking, I had tried to make only API calls to the javax.persistence APIs, thus I had very little package dependency changes. Since EclipseLink is based off TopLink virtually all the classes from TopLink appear in EclipseLink under a different naming convention. Basically oracle.toplink.essentials became org.eclipse.persistence. Since I have a nice level of unit testing around my services, I was able to quickly identify the places that were failing. In particular, I had some Query Hints that I was applying if the provider was the TopLink provider. I had to replicate this functionality for EclipseLink code paths (fortunately it was only in a few places). I think the biggest impact was on the Upgrade Tooling in which the SQLSchemaUpdateUtility had package dependencies on TopLink Essentials. Instead I roled this into a StatementExecutor interface/implementation and used reflection to call the APIs. Similarly, I did something similar for EclipseLink if I detected it as the persistence provider.

One observation I have noticed is that EclipseLink takes significantly longer to "initialize" than TopLink Essentials. This is most noticeable with the Unit Tests and HSQLDB, where the execution time is approximately ~ 5.0 seconds different. I brought up my JavaSE application in Netbeans 6.1 using the Profiler, and there is a significant time lag building and initializing the EntityManagerFactory. I am not convinced yet that there isn't a setting I am missing which is causing this lag. For example, launching my JavaSE application (which will query to see if there are any upgrades needed, query for all collections and countries, display the Swing UI etc.), almost 56% of the total startup time was spent in the deploy() method of the EntityManagerSetupImpl.

EclipseLink provides a nice compact javax.persistence_1.0.0.jar file which represents all of the J2EE javax.persistence classes required to compile. This is great for application development, and means you can provide your JPA provider at runtime (along with the persistence.xml configuration). Of course, this assumes you are using non-compile dependencies for things like QueryHints etc.

The documentation for EclipseLink seems a little disorganized, but overall there is a lot of information available through the EclipseLink Wiki User Guide.

I am looking forward to using some of the query features (such as fetches for foreign key objects) and it will take some time to really take advantage of the broader features being offered.