Tynamo committer, new Tynamo module:tapestry-jdo

The Announcement: 
First of all the announcement : as a new commiter to Tynamo, I have just released a new module, Tapestry-JDO, which allows Tapestry users to build applications based on JDO using familiar (from Hibernate and JPA integrations) Tapestry idioms for persistence manager injection and transaction management (using @CommitAfter). The official announcement is on the Tynamo Blog

The History
How that came about...

I've been a Tapestry user for a few years, usually lurking on the mailing lists and answering a question here and there , wherever I could contribute. I've always enjoyed Tapestry's approach to building web apps : pages, components, and annotation driven magic has been quite enjoyable, and the out of the box live class reloading make the experience pleasant and productive. At first I somewhat loathed the heavy emphasis on annotations to drive the framework magic; however, having dealt w/ the Grails' way of doing it for a few years, it now seems a bit  preferable for being more clear and explicit.

Fast forward a few years, Google announced the App Engine (GAE) and I was totally blown away of how they turned the world of java web app hosting on its head. Prior to GAE, Java web app hosting was both expensive and inconvenient - who would want to build publicly facing java apps, no wonder PHP ruled the roost . Of the two persistence APIs on the App Engine, JDO was the more familiar one, having spent a few years on the job working w/ JDO. Prior to GAE's choice to use JDO as a persistence API (at least in my world) it seemed like a dead end. Hibernate and JPA had taken the world by storm, and nobody seemed to care about JDO any longer. Another reason why JDO seemed interesting on the App Engine is that from its very inception JDO claimed that it was not necessarily married to relational databases. While back in the day that seemed to me like a not-so-interesting design goal, when GAE chose it as one of the options it seemed to make so much more sense to use that, as the backend store of GAE is non relational. Today, with the rise of  NoSQL, it really starts clicking (e.g. DataNucleus MongoDB  support) - all of a sudden, the same skillset that you've developed from the relational ORM days, you can apply in non-relational contexts - sweet !

So,  along the way I built a couple of apps to run on the App Engine - a site for  math problem solving assistance service and an artwork portfolio site . Neither of the apps were particularly complicated or difficult to build from a development point of view, but had just enough interaction w/ the back end where I had to deal w/ JDO directly - e.g. getting persistence managers, starting sessions, committing, all that. As much as I find Spring to be a useful tool in the toolbox, booting up a full blown spring container just too much for a simple web app. Additionally, the existence of tapestry-ioc makes Spring redundant and way too verbose for many of its possible usages within a simple web app. On the other hand, without Spring, manual transaction management is a royal PITA and I was looking for a better of way doing it. My first stab was to set up a Spring  dependency (w/o a spring container) to just get the Transaction manager classes and wire them up in Tapestry IOC. It worked pretty decently but the integration was just a kludge, not to mention the few megabytes that the four classes from Spring I used brought down with them.

Having been on the Tapestry mailing lists, the Tynamo project has continued to impress me with the suite of modules that the project kept releasing to fill needs in the tapestry community - e.g. jpa, security, routing, openid authentication, and more. Thus, when I started wondering where to look for an example of how to build the JDO support, Tynamo was the first candidate. So, I grabbed  Tynamo-JPA, moved some things around replaced all the usages of the JPA Entity Manager w/ JDO's PersistenceManager, touched every piece of code in the module and before you know it I had a working basic setup that allowed me to inject a PersistenceManager and use a @CommitAfter annotation to set up some automatic transaction management for myself. With that basic implementation I was able to finish the project that I was working on and everything looked great.

Then, came the question of what to do w/ my changes. It seemed that something like this might be a valuable contribution to the Tapestry community, yet I didn't quite feel like setting up a project somewhere . So, I figured, since I heavily borrowed from Tynamo in the implementation, why not ask them if they would be interested in having the module be a part of their project. On first thought it seemed like a long shot, my scrappy JDO module couldn't possibly fit within the pure awesomeness of Tynamo. Yet, I figured, it's worth a shot.  Shortly after I asked if they wanted it, they said yes, I zipped up the source and sent it out. I didn't necessarily plan on becoming a committer on the project, but before I knew it , Kalle had added me to the list and given me access to SVN, and posted an announcement on the blog about a new member of the project. I was a bit surprised by the warm welcome I received - I certainly felt that my contribution was appreciated.

To make the long story short, a few months later, major code and javadoc cleanup, fixing the tests and stepping through the Tynamo / Codehaus release process, the cat is out of the bag - the module is released, the announcements are out. I hope this new module is useful to someone.

Enjoy !