Toplink support for JPA vs. Toplink Essentials

Question

I think I read that Toplink has some support for EJB3/JPA as does Toplink Essentials.
What is the difference in features?
If one has a 10.1.3 app server license, should Toplink be used instead of Toplink Essentials for EJB3/JPA applications?
Does the Mapping Workbench produce JPA object-relational mapping annotations or XML?
Thank you.
Richard Catlin

Answer 1

Hi Robert,
I'm not sure which comments you were directing specifically to Dali vs. JDeveloper but I'll try and address them from a Dali perspective. I do want to point out that Dali is at 0.5 and so it is still under development.
yes you get a basic 1:1 entity from your databasetables...When generating Entities from tables, Dali will generate 1:1 and 1:many relationships based on database FK constraints.
@temporary annotations are not inserted if you have a Date oder Calendar type.Also when generating Entities from tables Dali will generate an instance variable of java.sql.Date for a database date column. java.sql.Date does not require an @Temporal annotation.
What's missing right now is a problem marker for missing @Temporal on java.util.Date and java.util.Calendar.
If you want to rename attributes or methods it's a lot of manual work to do... because >@Column annoations are not inserted, if they do not exist because of >dbname=attributenameThere is a bugzilla bug opened for this refactoring support. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=136333 Fortunately in Dali if you rename a class or attribute (field/getter) and your explicit or default mappings are broken you will get a problem marking on the attribute and in the Problems view so you can fix it rather than finding out at runtime.
generics are not inserted in the returnvalues of the methods...Generated Entities do use generics correctly e.g.:
public class Publisher implements Serializable {
     @OneToMany(mappedBy="publisher")
     private Set<Title> titles;
     public Set<Title> getTitles() {
          return this.titles;
     public void setTitles(Set<Title> titles) {
          this.titles = titles;
...--Shaun