End-of-life is a euphenism for a project/product that is “discontinued, unsupported and dead” 🙂
I have used Oracle TopLink for the past 10 years on various projects. It was one of the first ORM frameworks that “got it right”. Unfortunately, it was a commercial product that was out of the reach of most developers ($$$). Once comparable open-source projects came along such as Hibernate and iBatis, then it was really hard to justify the price of Oracle TopLink.
As a result, Oracle has decided to open-source TopLink and provide the source code to the EclipseLink project. So “TopLink” as a product name will fade in the sun set. EclipseLink will pick the best parts of TopLink and move forward.
The following blurb is posted on the Oracle TopLink site.
Oracle TopLink is a leader in the JPA community delivering the JPA 1.0 reference implementation with TopLink Essentials and now developing the JPA 2.0 reference implementation with EclipseLink.
As of Oracle TopLink 11g, TopLink Essentials has been replaced with EclipseLink JPA. EclipseLink JPA implements JPA 1.0 and is responsible for delivering the persistence framework.
Note: EclipseLink supports JPA 2.0 as of Dec 2009.
Oracle TopLink (R.I.P.).
Any news of TopLink’s death has been greatly exaggerated :).
From: http://otn.oracle.com/products/ias/toplink/index.html
“Oracle has proposed the creation of the Eclipse Persistence Platform (EclipseLink) project in Eclipse to deliver a comprehensive persistence platform. Oracle will lead this open source project and will contribute the source and test cases of its successful Oracle TopLink product to provide a starting point for the project. Oracle will continue to deliver its award winning Oracle TopLink product, offer support, and enhance its capabilities to meet the needs of customers. Oracle TopLink will be built on the Eclipse Persistence Platform and will extend it with advanced integration into the Oracle Application Server. ”
Since open sourcing the code, EclipseLink has added JPA 2.0 (reference implementation), JAXB 2.2, SDO 2.1.1 (reference implementation), database web services (DBWS), and OSGi support. The only change to TopLink is that it is now built on the EclipseLink platform.
Hi Blaise,
Thanks for the post. So in a nutshell, TopLink is open-sourced and rebranded as EclipseLink. Is that correct?