Oracle TopLink delivers a proven enterprise Java solution for all of your persistence needs based on high performance and scalability, developer productivity, and flexibility in architecture and design. TopLink is a member of the Oracle Fusion Middleware family of products, which bring greater agility, better decision-making, and reduced cost and risk to diverse IT environments today.

TopLink is thethe industry's most advanced object-to-relational persistence framework. It provides a highly flexible and productive mechanism for storing Java objects and Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) in relational database tables. TopLink offers developers excellent performance and choice, working with:

• any database
• any application server
• any development toolset and process, and
• any J2EE architecture.

Oracle TopLink 11g R1 (11.1.1.1.0) offers a significant set of new features based on the inclusion of the EclipseLink project along with improved Oracle Coherence integration in the TopLink Grid feature.

JPA Enhancements

The upgrade of Oracle TopLink's JPA implementation from EclipseLink 1.0.2 to 1.1.1 includes a number of minor enhancements and new features including:

·        Unidirectional OneToMany Mappings removes the requirement of a back reference from Entities contained in the collection. It also removes the need for a join table to maintain the join information.

·        TABLE_PER_CLASS Inheritance is an optional feature in the JPA 1.0 specification that provides for the mapping of each concrete subclass in a hierarchy to a separate table; there are no common tables shared between classes. All common fields are replicated in each table. This strategy can be efficient for queries targeted at a specific subclass but does not perform well in general.

Service Data Objects

This release includes EclipseLink 1.1.1's Service Data Objects (SDO) implementation which supports both SDO 2.1.0 and 2.1.1 applications. EclipseLink SDO is the reference implementation for SDO 2.1.1 as defined in JSR 235. Within the Oracle WebLogic Server users will have out of the box usage of SDO 2.1.0.

The EclipseLink SDO implementation enables Java developer to efficiently build and use data object models that can be incorporated into service architectures. It supports both dynamic and static SDO (through a schema compiler) application development. In addition, EclipseLink SDO has support for persisting SDOs with JPA to relational databases. Data objects can be queried from a database with JPQL, marhalled across the network, modified, returned to the server, and changes applied to the database. EclipseLink SDO and JPA provide an integrated solution for SCA applications with relational storage requirements.

Database Webservices

The first edition of EclipseLink DBWS included in this release allows developers to build JAX-WS web services that provide access to relational database data, stored procedures, and Oracle PL\SQL. DBWS web services can be generated directly from relational metadata or SQL statements. DBWS leverages the advanced object-relational (O/R) mapping and object-XML (O/X) binding features of EclipseLink to provide xml-relational (X/R) data access. DBWS generated web services can be customized to meet specific application requirements.

Backwards Compatibility

This release continues to ship the original TopLink packaged in the oracle.toplink.* packages, OC4J integration, and Mapping Workbench. This will allow existing customers to continue to use TopLink as they always have with minimal intrusion upgrading to 11gR1. These libraries include:

·        /jlib/toplink.jar

·        /jlib/toplink-oc4j.jar

·        /jlib/toplink-src.zip

·        /utils/workbench/*

These libraries and functionality will continue to be shipped in this major release and its associated patch-sets. Customers are encouraged to upgrade to the EclipseLink libraries and migrate to the software in the org.eclipse.persistence.* packages to take advantage of future improvements and new features.