Kudos

• ASM - bytecode generation framework
• Lucene Text Indexing
• Gerry Power - equals hashcode technique
• JPA (EJB3 Persistence), Hibernate, Toplink et al

ASM - bytecode generation framework

ASM is a small and fast framework for reading and generating byte code. It provides very good control over the byte code generated and very impressive performance. I cannot recommend this project highly enough.

ASM is used in Ebean to generate 'Dynamic subclasses' for 'Lazy Loading' and 'Old Values Creation'. It is also used to replace reflection with generated code for performance.

Lucene Text Indexing

A open source Text Indexing engine that is now an apache project.

Ebean integration with Lucene enables the automatic maintenance of 'text indexes'. These can be queried (by FindByTextSearch) returning a standard list/set/map of beans.

You get to control how the index in built, what fields are indexed and can Ebean provides automatic management of the indexes.

Gerry Power - equals hashcode technique

An interesting issue is how to deal with equals and hashcode in regards entity beans. Gerry Power has demonstrated a good approach which I believe is going to be hard to beat. As such I have included it as an approach that Ebean can provide via generated code.

JPA (EJB3 Persistence), Hibernate, Toplink et al

Kudos to people who have brought us the JPA specification. Obviously I am disappointed with some aspects of the API (the need for session managment of EntityManager) and believe it could have been made much simpler to use and understand but that is only an opinion.

I expect the MetaData Annotations (Chapter 9) part of the specification to be a reasonably stable and sound foundation moving forward. This part of the specification looks to have a long and stable future and this is significant in itself.

The ORM space is much better for having this specification. People who like/want 'sessions' I would expect to like this spec, and people who do not like/want 'sessions' should at least like the standardization of the ORM Mapping MetaData.