Mike: TopLink brings with it a strong history and long track record in this market. It is proven, scalable technology that has its feature set evolved from use by thousands of customers building challenging, diverse applications. After 10 years, we have the richest, most powerful feature set available and can address very sophisticated requirements.

Another major differentiating factor is we offer functionality beyond a pure O/R mapping product. We provide the ability to map to XML and other types of non-relational data. TopLink brings much more to the table in terms of the complete data integration story than it ever has before. It is very exciting actually, because as we offer bigger and better solutions it also keeps it interesting for us at the development level. TopLink has proven itself as a leading and visionary product and has lead the way in O/R mapping for a decade, now. We will continue to show leadership as the problem space expands.

And even if I cannot convince you that JDO is not a dead end, it is still a standard today. That means that you can freely switch between the multiple vendors out there, and take advantage of the vendor that comes out with the best migration tools to switch to the new API once J2EE 1.5 is released in 12-15 months. So even if you believe JDO is a dead-end spec, it still has advantages over using a product that doesn’t adhere to any spec at all.