[science-iwg] A technical question : status of eclipselink / gemini JPA

[Erwin de Ley <erwin.de.ley@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

Triquetrum's goal is to be an open and extensible platform itself, but 
also to be able to deliver plugins that can easily be integrated in 
other such platforms.
And the typical shape will be an RCP application I guess.
(we'll also deliver headless components, but this is even irrelevant for 
the issue described)

At some point in the near future, we'll start integrating a persistence 
service, preferably based on JPA.
We will need to be able to provide & register entity implementations 
from our bundles, while also allowing other bundles to do the same.
And without blocking the possibility that they should belong to the same 
persistence unit.
(e.g. cases where extensions provide entity subclasses that must fit in 
one of the normal mapping strategies, or where there are associations 
mapped to foreign keys etc)

But there seem to be some issues with the current state-of-affairs to 
use a JPA implementation in an OSGi/RCP setup, in a modular way.
I.e. it is required that there is 
one-persistence-bundle-to-rule-them-all that registers all entities in 
one shot.
This of course does not fit our needs (as also for many other modular 
systems, for which OSGi is meant)

Furthermore it even seems that eclipselink, since some time, no longer 
targets an OSGi runtime, and that their support for this has been moved 
to Gemini JPA.
But Gemini JPA seems quite dead : a milestone that remains unfinished 
since a couple of years.

Does anyone have any experience in this? There are several 
old-and-more-recent forum posts and bugzilla tickets open in this 
domain, but there seems to be no evolution/solution in the 2 mentioned 
eclipse projects. Is there some effort/stretegy on some eclipse 
foundation PMC level or so, to determine what the strategy is related to 
JPA/OSGi/eclipse/modularity?

thanks
erwin