Ok I admit that in Ocotber I was a bit distracted but it totally amazed me when I found out last night that Oracle open sourced 'TopLink Essentials' as part of Glassfish. Looking at this the initial code was checked in in mid October, that is amazing. Why did I not hear about that? Seems like big news to me... But maybe it is just me, I first heard of TopLink when it was a Smalltalk product. Ah showing my age again...

So is Oracle turing over a new leaf in thier approach to Open Source?

I'm not sure because of stuff like this. If Top Link is part of the Glassfish community why are the EJB 3.0 extensions they are offering called out as such? Why not just be 'Glassfish extensions'. But that could just be a lack of community participation expierence on the part of who ever wrote that doco. If you dig into the FishEye link though none of the oracle classes have been repackage to be part of the glassfish package space. Perhaps its seen as little bang for the buck but I'd feel better about their commitment if the code were repackaged to the glassfish package structure. And yes I do know that the glassfish community exists to make me feel better :-)

On the positive side Oracle is donating ADF Faces to the ASF and specifically the MyFaces team. Very cool indeed. So this is very exciting indeed. Maybe Oracle is starting to get it (we will have to wait and see).

Here are some more links about this in no particular order...

• Interview with the persistence team on glassfish
• 'toplink blog' entry about glassfish/toplink integration (short of detail) but the rest of the blog looks good.
• glassfish page on persistence
• Interesting to ponder

So anyway, very interesting times that we live in...