The Eclipse Foundation has approved the JSR220-ORM Project proposed by Versant Corp. in March of this year. The Eclipse JSR220-ORM Project will produce standards-based, object-relational mapping design-time tooling in Eclipse. JSR220 is the specification defining the standard for object-relational mapping (ORM) in Java. Object-relational mapping has emerged in the last year as a critical missing piece of software architecture in the drive to make the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform more powerful and easier to program. The Eclipse JSR220-ORM Project is designed to bring common tooling to the Java and Eclipse community to expand programming productivity and the value of Eclipse.

"The creation of the JSR220-ORM project is an important milestone for the Eclipse community," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, Inc. "This project will provide a common framework for delivering productivity and consistency in the important area of object-relational mapping."

The goal of the JSR220-ORM Project is to provide visual development tools that facilitate round-trip engineering when using the JSR 220 (EJB 3.0 persistence) and JSR 243 (Java Data Objects) approaches to persistence. It will provide an implementation that is extensible to accommodate other persistence standards and can be extended to generate artifacts for alternative object-relational mapping runtimes. This project internally uses the Eclipse Modeling Framework and the Eclipse Data Tools Project Schema Model for consistency with the Eclipse framework, which eases integration and adoption in other projects.

"I am pleased the JSR220-ORM Project is transitioning to this new phase in the Eclipse development process," said Robert Greene, vice president of product strategy at Versant. "It solidifies Versant's commitment to the Eclipse community and moves the Eclipse Platform one step closer to providing important ORM tooling for this critical technology segment," Greene added. "The members of the JSR220-ORM Project are looking forward to the first milestone release in early August when the Eclipse community will be in a position to take advantage of this new technology approach. The first milestone will deliver Forward, and Meet-in-the-Middle mapping for JSR220 runtimes. Eclipse developers of Java applications using relational database technology will finally begin to enjoy the ease of development long promised in the emerging JSR220 specification."

Robert Greene is the project lead for the Eclipse JSR220-ORM Project. Scott Ambler, a leading authority on object-relational mapping has joined the project as a developer and architectural advisor. Dirk Le Roux, a committer on this project, was also approved as a committer to the Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project acknowledging this project's code and architectural contributions to the shared frameworks.

"The JSR220-ORM Project is an important new addition to the Eclipse Technology Project," said John Graham, of Sybase, who is the Project Management Committee lead for the Eclipse Data Tools Platform Project. "JSR220-ORM will help insure that we meet the needs of the community by providing important tools in the area of object-relational mapping. To aid in this task, Xiao Wang, from Sybase, has joined the project as an architect."