Cayenne team is glad to announce that 1.1 release has officially entered Beta. We are in the feature freeze now and will be working towards the final release. The plan is to work on fixing bugs, improving CayenneModeler, writing more documentation and examples.

The beta can be downloaded from http://objectstyle.org/

1.1 release is a huge leap compared to 1.0. It includes advanced caching with distributed cache synchronization, new Expression API, more database adapters, scriptable SQLTemplate query to name just a few new things.

While many of these features were available as a part of milestone releases since winter (and actually used in production by many users), current beta stage offers extra stability guarantees to developers, as API and mapping DTD will be frozen now.

On an slightly unrelated topic, recent TSS Cayenne article (http://theserverside.com/articles/article.tss?l=Cayenne) and discussions that followed caused a lot of interest in Cayenne among TheServerSide community members. I am definitely curious to know more about the experiences of our new users.

Andrus

Full disclosure: I'm a member of the JDO 2.0 expert group.

Just curious whether the Cayenne team is planning on a JDO 2.0 compliance effort. I have not yet looked at the product carefully and would like to, but I thought I'd at least pose the question now that the JDO 2.0 draft has been out for a few weeks.

--matthew

We don't have immediate plans to make Cayenne JDO compliant, as adding some cool functionality planned after 1.1 is much higher priority.

But we will assist anyone willing to start such effort ;-)

The beta can be downloaded from http://objectstyle.org/

Oops, of course full download link is http://objectstyle.org/cayenne/download.html though the one posted in the message eventually leads to Cayenne too ;-)

What I would really like to see is a zero-effort ORM tool. By this I mean that I can persist an object by just specifying the data source. The tool should be able to recognize the corresponding RDBMS schema and perform the mapping automatically.

I dont want to mess around with XML files or GUIs to configure the mapping myself. I do understand that this will mean that some conventions should be followed when designing the objects and the RDBMS schema but thats a small price to pay for the automated persistence available...

Is any such feature / ORM Tool already available?

There is a very big risk to use this library, but it is not a problem if you
will find it forkable : http://voruta.sourceforge.net
There is no persistence with this tool, it is declarative data access only and any kind of IDE is your UI, but it has UI for performance tuning and monitoring.

I dont really want to mess up the code further with Javadoc tags :-)

I dont really want to mess up the code further with Javadoc tags :-)

It will be possible mess up the code with anotations in the next version, but is it better to mess up file system with XML files ? You can implemnt this kind of data access fromework yourself, use cglib or JDK Proxy and iBATIS, it will take a few hours to implement this framework and you will have better solotion than any current O/R mapping implementation. I have used this way with property file before, but I found javadock is better in many ways.

What I would really like to see is a zero-effort ORM tool. By this I mean that I can persist an object by just specifying the data source. The tool should be able to recognize the corresponding RDBMS schema and perform the mapping automatically.

That's what cayenne is for. If you have you DB up and running, GUI has excelent reverse engineer option. All you need is to start Modeler, configure data source, click "generate classes", and your persistance layer is ready to use.

I dont want to mess around with XML files or GUIs to configure the mapping myself. I do understand that this will mean that some conventions should be followed when designing the objects and the RDBMS schema but thats a small price to pay for the automated persistence available...Is any such feature / ORM Tool already available?

Can I configure the objects model, and configure Cayenne to create the tables automatically?

D. Orbach
http://www.javasight.com
Javasight - A view to the java world

You can easily create mapped tables from the Modeler - there is a "Generate Database Schema" menu.

IIRC, there is also a feature request to do the same operation via an ant task. This will be added at some point too, as the code is already there, all we need is to wrap it with Ant Task subclass.

Andrus