JPA : TCK request and JPA2.1

It is now almost exactly a year since we submitted a request for access to the JPA2 TCK (JSR0317). We provided everything requested of us by Oracle, and we still haven’t received the JPA2 TCK. Just to say Happy Anniversary Oracle on this evidently controversial request. The only possible reasons that I can think of for lack of provision of this are either incompetence, or deliberate prevention of access. Needless to say, we no longer wish to have access to this TCK.

On a related note I was asked whether I’d be participating in the JPA2.1 (JSR0338) expert group. I did think about it, no really! 🙂 But then I remembered that I spent many hours sending emails chasing Oracle employees to fulfil the request for the JPA2.0 TCK all to no avail. We also have to remember that JPA was born out of politics nothing more. Consequently the answer had to be a NO.

I have every willingness to participate in truly open standards on Java persistence, based on technical reasons. Any such participation would be with open mailing-lists/forums, and an open testing capability so that anyone can validate the compliance of any implementation. JPA, and the JCP process it operates under, is not that; JPA standardises things like “Criteria” that is widely recognised as inelegant (many call it ugly actually) and hard to use. A standard should take something that has become accepted as a good way of doing something (such as QueryDSL, for example) and convert it into something coherent with a clean API (like what we did with JDO Typesafe); it should not invent something and impose it on people. The JPA philosophy is simply wrong in this respect. I wish them good luck with JPA2.1, and DataNucleus will, at some point (typically as soon as the spec is made public), implement what they come up with, but I will not be party to its “design”.