1.1. JDO Background

The wheels for an object persistence specification were put into motion in June 1999 under the Java Community Process (JCP) with both individuals and corporations contributing in the development. The first version of the JDO specification, the toolkit, and a reference implementation were released in April 2002.

Already, a dozen or so vendor implementations of the JDO standard are available, including a few open-source releases. A brief summary and comparison of these products can be found in Appendix A. The developer community is growing with more and more developers gravitating to the simplicity and ease of use that JDO has exposed. A good place to explore and exchange ideas is http://www.jdocentral.com (and the alias [email protected]).