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Upgrading from EclipseLink 1.0.2 to Latest : To JPA or not ? [message #1693876]

Wed, 29 April 2015 05:40

Radhakrishnan Jankiraman

Messages: 2
Registered: October 2013

Junior Member

We have a J2EE application that uses EclipseLink for persistence. We are on a pretty old version - v1.0.2. This is a 10+ year old legacy code base. Even though we are on a very old version, it has worked well so far and we have never had any issues with EclipseLink. However, we would like to keep up with time. And would like to move to latest version of EclipseLink.

The question is should we just upgrade to latest version or in addition also move to the JPA annotations and Persistence Context based approach ?

My understanding was that the JPA support in EclipseLink is just a layer added on top of the core EclipseLink engine. The following are the differences between Eclipse Link with JPA and without JPA

1. Bootstrapping of the Eclipse Link run time now down by the container instead of having to be done programmatically
2. Annotations provide syntactic sugar. They are definitely more concise,readable /expressive compared to the old programmatic descriptors ( There might still be some feature that is available through descriptor but not through annotations. )
3. There would be performance benefits due to weaving and the dirty change detection mechanism on an entity instance. This might make a difference if there are a large number of entities in a unit of work. ( Please correct / revise my understanding )
4. The programming model changes with having to work with Persistence Context / Entity Manager etc.

1. Would be a slightly disruptive change for us
2. Doesn't solve any problems for us, but would definitely improve readability
3. There might be a few use cases that could benefit from this. And whatever benefits ensue would definitely improve transaction throughput under load conditions.
4. This is going to turn out into a laborious exercise for us.

We did do a POC of trying out the JPA annotations and the persistence.xml change. But changing the programming model for every use case is going to be laborious given that we have persistence code repeated in multiple places. Given this, we are leaning towards just upgrading to latest version and not moving to JPA programming model.

The question is, what do we stand to loose if we don't move to pure JPA over and above what I have listed above ?

Thanks,
Radhakrishnan

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Re: Upgrading from EclipseLink 1.0.2 to Latest : To JPA or not ? [message #1695603 is a reply to message #1693876]

Sun, 17 May 2015 22:56

Lukas Jungmann

Messages: 36
Registered: November 2013
Location: Prague, Czech Republic

Member

Native EclipseLink APIs are still there even though there could have been made some backwards incompatible changes since v 1.0.2 you're using. So even if you just upgrade to the latest version, you may be facing some issues. It would be definitely better if you will, together with the upgrade, start moving to JPA.

--lukas

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