EclipseLink is the open source Eclipse Persistence Services Project from the

Eclipse Foundation The Eclipse Foundation AISBL is an independent, Europe-based not-for-profit corporation that acts as a steward of the Eclipse open source software development community, with legal jurisdiction in the European Union. It is an organization suppo ...

. The software provides an extensible framework that allows Java developers to interact with various data services, including databases, web services, Object XML mapping (OXM), and

enterprise information system An Enterprise Information System (EIS) is any kind of information system which improves the functions of enterprise business processes by integration. This means typically offering high quality of service, dealing with large volumes of data and cap ...

s (EIS). EclipseLink supports a number of persistence standards including: *

Jakarta Persistence Jakarta Persistence (JPA; formerly Java Persistence API) is a Jakarta EE application programming interface specification that describes the management of relational data in enterprise Java applications. Persistence in this context covers three a ...

(JPA) *

Jakarta XML Binding Java XML Binding (JAXB; formerly Java Architecture for XML Binding) is a software framework that allows Java EE developers to map Java classes to XML representations. JAXB provides two main features: the ability to ''marshal'' Java objects into ...

(JAXB) *

Jakarta Connectors Jakarta Connectors (JCA; formerly Java EE Connector Architecture and J2EE Connector Architecture) is a Java programming language tool for connecting application servers and enterprise information systems (EIS) as part of enterprise application i ...

(JCA) *

Service Data Objects Service Data Objects is a technology that allows heterogeneous data to be accessed in a uniform way. The SDO specification was originally developed in 2004 as a joint collaboration between Oracle ( BEA) and IBM and approved by the Java Community ...

(SDO) EclipseLink is based on the

TopLink Oracle TopLink is a mapping and persistence framework for Java developers. TopLink is produced by Oracle and is a part of Oracle's OracleAS, WebLogic, and OC4J servers. It is an object-persistence and object-transformation framework. TopLink pr ...

product from which

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word '' ...

contributed the source code to create the EclipseLink project. The original contribution was from TopLink's 11g code base, and the entire code-base/feature set was contributed, with only EJB 2 Container-Managed Persistence (CMP) and some minor

Oracle Application Server The Oracle Application Server 10g (the "g" stands for ''grid'') (short Oracle AS), consists of an integrated, standards-based software platform. It forms part of Oracle Corporation's Fusion Middleware technology stack. The heart of Oracle Applic ...

specific integration removed. This differs from the TopLink Essentials

GlassFish GlassFish is an open-source Jakarta EE platform application server project started by Sun Microsystems, then sponsored by Oracle Corporation, and now living at the Eclipse Foundation and supported by Payara, Oracle and Red Hat. The supported v ...

contribution, which did not include some key enterprise features. The package names were changed and some of the code and configuration was moved around. The TopLink Mapping Workbench user interface has also been contributed to the project. EclipseLink is the intended path forward for persistence for Oracle and TopLink. It is intended that the next major release of Oracle TopLink will include EclipseLink as well as the next major release of Oracle Application Server. EclipseLink supports usage in an

OSGi OSGi is an open specification and open source project under the Eclipse Foundation. It is a continuation of the work done by the OSGi Alliance (formerly known as the Open Services Gateway initiative), which was an open standards organization for ...

environment.

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

has selected the EclipseLink project to be the

reference implementation In the software development process, a reference implementation (or, less frequently, sample implementation or model implementation) is a program that implements all requirements from a corresponding specification. The reference implementation o ...

for JPA 2.0.,

did the same for JPA 2.1 and later JPA specifications.

References

External links

* {{Eclipse Foundation Java platform Eclipse (software) Eclipse technology Eclipse software Object-relational mapping