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So, many years go, (back around the time of EJB 1.1) I was working on a project where we were developing on IBM WebSphere against a SQL Server database and trying to deploy the application on HP Bluestone running against an Oracle database. (Don't ask why -- management had decided that Java was the next best thing and went blindly into several projects that eventually brought the company to its knees...)

Anyway, in the wake of those efforts (and after the company had decided that it couldn't afford to keep me on board) I got to thinking that there had to be a better way than EJBs. For the project I did a little bit with metadata-driven persistence (something the company had been doing with Objective-C), and decided to explore the idea a little bit further with Java. So, in my spare time, I tinkered with a metadata-driver persistence engine. During that process, I realized that most of the repetitive work of creating an application could actually be automated. The end result (which really isn't an end result yet, as it is still a work in process) is RACE, a program / API that includes a Persistence Engine, a GUI front end, and also a set of JSP tags and Swing Beans that can be used to build applications (the program can even generate the JSP pages for you).

Now, my current company is evaluating Hibernate, and I am seeing a lot of similarities between RACE and Hibernate. (Convergent evolution...) So much so that I am currently working on having RACE generate .hbm.xml files, since it captures much of that information already.

So what I'm looking for here is comments/suggestions. Even things like RACE stinks; Hibernate does it better and more efficiently are useful. (Of course Hibernate does it more efficiently; they've got a team working on it, and I'm just me, part-time at that....) The website above contains downloads for both the Windows installer and a .zip file that you can just extract if you wish/don't have Windows (You'll have to change the Environment.properties file with specific path information if you do that). Also, there's a PDF manual for the RACE front-end application, as well as API documentation (in the form of JavaDoc) for the persistence engine itself. (I'm planning a small tutorial, but that's not up there yet.)

Anyway, if anybody has the time and the inclination, let me know what you think.

Oh, if you do download it and run it without reading the manual first, use __Coolskill as the username and password to log onto the system. (While it is primarily a self-contained application, it could be run in a multi-user environment off of a centralized database, so I added users to it.) Please note that the GUI application was built with itself, so that is a demonstration of what RACE can do.

That's enough rambling from me, and thanks to those who take the time to comment.
 
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