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.).