Versant drops plans for JDO2; says POJO is the way to go

Versant, producers of one of the larger commercial JDO implementations, recently made an interesting announcement on their site.

A while ago, they open-sourced their JDO implementation (Versant Open Access) and offered to take the project lead role for the Eclipse JSR220-ORM project, which aims to integrate Object-Relational Mapping into the Eclipse platform. Originally, the aim was to support both the upcoming JDO2 standard and the upcoming EJB3 standard. Recently however, they essentially abandoned most of their ambitions for JDO2, saying:

“Versant is very disappointed to have taken this approach, but the whole point for Versant of supporting JDO to begin with was to have an industry standard interface. It is extremely unfortunate and comes at great cost to Versant that JDO will not be that standard interface. Yes, JDO is a standard, but it will not be widely used and therefore would serve no long term benefit to Versant, it’s long term stability and in turn Versant’s customer base.”

In other words, this once-prominent JDO vendor is saying that EJB3 and POJO persistence are the way to go, and that JDO is losing ground already and is expected to lose more of it as time goes on. Of course, one vendor’s opinion does not determine the market. For example, SolarMetric, recently aquired by BEA, seems to be still going strong.

It’s an interesting development however. Now that EJB3 is moving in the direction of the more lightweight POJO persistence technique popularized by Hibernate, while at the same time Hibernate is basically becoming an EJB3 implementation (or vice versa, depending on who you ask), there’s a lot more overlap between the three major ORM standards than there used to be. Is it time for a showdown in which the winner takes all?