It turns out that former Solarmetric partner, Versant, has acquired JDO Genie. I'm here at JavaONE and found out this morning when I met David Tinker, the creator of JDO Genie.

Press Release Excerpt

JDO Genie Pty(Ltd) today announced the acquisition of the JDO Genie product and customers by Versant Corporation. Versant is an industry leader in specialized data managenment and persistence software.

JDO Genie customers will receive enhanced support from Versant's expanded range of support offerings and will also benefit from Versant's entire product suite that includes VDS, FastObjects products and JDO product families. The JDO Genie development team will continue to develop and support the software in an ongoing consulting contract with Versant.

"We are excited to be working with Versant. This deal expands the horizon for JDO Genie far beyond what is possible for a small South African company," said David Tinker, CTO of JDO Genie Pty(Ltd). "This is a very positive development for our customers. They will receive enhanced support and the development of JDO Genie will be accelerated."

JDO Genie is a cost effective and high performance alternative to entity beans, proprietary object/relational mapping products and JDBC. It implements version 1.0.1 of the Java Data Objects standard for transparent persistence. Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Informix, Informix SE, Hypersonic, Pointbase, Interbase, Firebird, Postgres and SAP DB are all supported.

Applications can be run standalone or deployed on Tomcat, Resin and other web containers. The Enterprise edition adds EJB support for JBoss, WebLogic and WebSphere and clustering using Tangosol Coherence or JGroups.

The industry leading GUI Workbench improves productivity by providing O/R mapping support, interactive development of JDOQL and SQL queries, live object graph editing, BeanShell scripting and printing combined class and E/R diagrams. Client/server JDO applications can be developed efficiently using the unique JDO Genie remote PersistenceManager technology.

Read the Press Release

Will it cast negative influence on JDO's RDBMS support?

So far I see JDOGenie the best JDO implementation on RDBMS...

Anyway, congratulations to this action!

Hi Bin

Versant have bought JDO Genie specifically for our strong RDBMS support. This is very much the focus of the product and the number one priority for the development team. We are aggresively implementing JDO 2 O/R functionality and improving our O/R mapping options. JDO Genie will support Versant database in future but most of this work will be done by existing Versant people with strong VDS skills, not by the current JDO Genie team.

Thanks for the positive comments about JDO Genie.

Also, just to clarify something in the post, JDO Genie was created by a team of developers (including Jaco, Carl and Dirk), not just me :)

Cheers
David

I have to agree with Bin. It always worries me when a company who clearly has a vested interest in a proprietary product (such as VDS) buys a company that provides access to such products in an agnostic way. Although Oracle has certainly let TopLink do it's own thing... Maybe it's just the cynic in me.

I was delighted to hear that the entire JDO Genie development team is being retained by Versant. I can't say enough good things about the product or the responsiveness of the developers. On the project I am currently working on, after almost a year of development and many hundreds of thousands of lines of code, I can honestly say that persistence is the least of my worries. And now that I am using JDO Genie 3.0 and it's Eclipse plugin, enhancement is handled completely behind the scenes. Couldn't be easier.

Keep up the great work guys, and I hope you all got a little something out of the Versant buyout. :^)

Phil

Here is the official Versant press release:

http://www.versant.com/press/2004/PR_JDOGenie-040628.pdf

Cheers
David

I think this is fantastic news! I have been evaluating the different JDO implementaitons for my next project and was seriously considering JDO Genie, however my main concern was the longevity and viability of what appeard to be basically a one-man effort. This acquisition moves JDO Genie up quite a few notches in our consideration matrix.

Hi Matthew

I am glad to here that JDO Genie is going to get another look in your evaluation. JDO Genie only appeared to be a one man effort as I did most of the public facing stuff (support, forums, docs etc.). The other guys (Jaco, Carl and Dirk) all have English as a second language so it is just much easier for me to quickly post replies and so on.

Cheers
David

Didn't they buy Poet (http://www.fastobjects.com/us/) already last year, who are developing a really good (as far as I can judge) JDO-OODBMS solution with their FastObjects product line and AFAIK were the initiators of the JDOCentral community? Seems like JDO is playing the central role in the strategies of Versant nowadays -- hopefully they won't be able to corner this market, thus monopolizing it...

Cheers,
Lars

(Disclaimer: I'm not connected to Poet, Versant or JDOCentral.)

Didn't they buy Poet (http://www.fastobjects.com/us/) already last year, who are developing a really good (as far as I can judge) JDO-OODBMS solution with their FastObjects product line and AFAIK were the initiators of the JDOCentral community?

As a former Poet, I can confirm this.

Seems like JDO is playing the central role in the strategies of Versant nowadays -- hopefully they won't be able to corner this market, thus monopolizing it...

I don't think they could do it with so many RDBMSs integrating with JDO. However, in the "ODBMS section" (if there is such a thing) of the JDO community, I guess Versant is about to be the central player.

Regards,
Jens