Tutorials.

Highlight ease of use, time to market.

Emphasize that JPA skills are not lost by using Ebean, that portability back to JPA is a snap if needed.

Answer blogs and your own forums.

Listen to developers. Build for them and in response to their requests - when within the vision.

Have quick updates. The turnaround attracts attention.

Programmers have more on their hands than ORM. Provide convenience and speed for development.

new Timestamp(new java.util.Date().getTime()); ??? Would the addition of a no argument constructor make sense? Your api should not be like that.

Well, focus on the people that use the software and the people will take care of your marketing.

Thanks, very good points.

Slightly off topic, but I've been thinking that generating annotated beans from a DB schema is possibly the next most important thing for Ebean. For people unfamilar with JPA mapping (annotations etc) a generator is probably the key to getting going with Ebean.

So I'm thinking I need to polish up the generator (preferably as a IDE plugin) then make a video demonstrating that process.

Take a look at this post. Maybe you already did.

Criticism of JPA framework.

http://fromapitosolution.blogspot.com/2008/12/criticism-of-java-persistence.html

I'd have a mission statement as follows:

The less developers think of ORM, the more they think of Ebean.

Thanks for the link (no I hadn't seen it). I've posted a comment there...

I also I'm thinking that I need to be a lot clearer as to the benefits of using Ebean over JPA, and put that on the home page.

I understand that by being session-less ebean is different than JPA but as an application developer it is easier to sell ebean to me as a clean JPA implementation as opposed to a different API. Based on what I've seen in Hibernate and OpenJPA you can call yourself a JPA service provider and still have a bunch of "non-standard" features.