What’s cooking in the project?

Maybe somebody could have tought that Ammentos project was freezed, or maybe abandoned because, I see, an unusual time delay has passed since last official release 1.3.7.

Instead, not only the project is still absolutely alive, but it’s growing very quick, and so let me anticipate some of the important news about the present and the next future.

Contributions

First of all, a new important contributor has joined the project. He’s Charles Lyons, the author of Sun Certified Web Component Developer Study Companion. He has made a very interesting study about how to intoduce some new great features into Ammentos. He sent me an incredibly detailed document containing a description of his intentions, and some diff patches to try directly what he meant. So we started a very good collaboration, which is already giving great results.

Features

The biggest work is being done into the internal engine, the DatabasePersistor component. A new internal sql generator is under development, which is capable of performing joined queries in order to limitate the number of queries in case of inheritance or relationships. Inheritance support is also being greatly improved with the introduction of typetables and discriminators, automatic key/superKey synchronitazion and so on. Polymorphism is the keyword of all these changes: the purpose is to make Ammentos able to load the correct subclass of the one passed to Ammentos.load(Class<?> c, …); for instance a query like:

Person p = Ammentos.load(Person.class, "Lewis Hamilton");

will return an instance of Pilot instead of simply a Person.

Roadmap

Unfortunately I am still not able to talk about roadmap. What I can say is that a basic support for polymorphism is already running and passing our tests, and that the new sql engine is currently under its first phase of development. We really hope to make all this stuff available for this autumn. If you are courious about new features, you would like to help us with code contributions and/or comments, bugs detection and so on, please feel free to participate.