I have to admit that I’m darned excited (though apparently not quite excited enough to unleash a stronger expletive) about the Eclipse Java Persistence Platform (EclipseLink) project proposal. The name “EclipseLink” is an obvious play on the name “TopLink” which is the name of the Oracle Product from which the initial code contribution will come from.
Why am I so excited about this project? There’s a couple of good reasons. A big reason is that TopLink is a darned good product that’s used by a lot of companies (small-, medium-, and large-sized). It’s a product that has evolved in a very “Eclipsey” (Eclipsish?) way: customer feedback is continually driven back into the product; it’s a platform that helps developers do what they really need to do based on actual field experience.
Another reason why I’m excited about this project is that it pretty much brings me full circle. TopLink was the first commercial product that I ever worked on. Granted, I worked on TopLink Smalltalk way back in the early 90s, but the TopLink for Java developers did give me an opportunity to rant here and there about what I thought the Java version should do.
So… this project is exciting for me because it adds high-value, high-quality functionality to the Eclipse stack; it adds top-quality developers to the Eclipse committer list; and I get to hang out with a bunch of old friends.
Check out the project proposal here.
Eclipse Hints, Tips, and Random Musings 
Wayne,Yes, I’m absolutely thrilled too. This project has some significant overlap with Teneo. But that’s a good thing because Martin Taal is already working with Shaun Smith and Stephan Eberle to combine their efforts; they are being added as committers to Teneo. At EclipseCon, Shaun and Stephan gave a really cool demo that showed how EMF model instances can be persisted to a data base; Martin gave a similar demo for Teneo and his approach even works for dynamic models, i.e., ones for which no code has been generated. In both cases it was amazing stuff that will be a real boost to the modeling community. I anticipate many good things to come!
Call me dense, can someone give me a down to earth view of what exactly is TopLink and how I would work with it as a developer?