JSR 317

So, JSR 317.

Very cool, very awesome JSR. What's cool about it? Well you see, it makes a Java standard of a technology I am already intimately familiar with! So it's really really great!!!

Ok, I was being sarcastic. Whether or not ORM is a Good Idea™ is still not completely settled in my mind. There is a relatively large amount of overhead, within the knowledge that programmers must have AND efficiency. Also, everyone is doing it.

The good news is that the overhead is partially addressed with the new stuff in JPA 2.0, specifically the Criteria API. This API goes a long way to completely replace the Database with Objects in the mind of the Java enterprise programmer, leaving a scarred wasteland of smoking JDBC bodies and tormented souls of DBAs. In intervals divisible by 2 those souls cry out with words that chill the very spine of those who hear them. Words like "normalization," "query efficiency" and "this is not a search engine."

Well to be fair those last two were phrases.

Oh well. Anyway, I am looking forward to Nov 16th, when the JSR is supposed to hit the streets. I mark the date with a shot of rakia, a toast to the people that told me I must take Relational Databases in college, or else risk not being ever hired as a programmer.