Wow.

IBM has outdone themselves. I'm struggling to find words to express what I think of their latest announcement. IBM has released a new Eclipse plugin that they call JLinq. It's essentially an O/R mapping tool that does most of its work using design time code generation. It generates SQL from beans or beans from SQL. It's essentially a bunch of Eclipse wizards that generate code. Not especially impressive, and a surprising direction after all the recent hype about JPA, Hibernate and EJB 3.

Of course bad software being released from IBM is nothing new. What I find truly exasperating about JLinq is the name. Surly a Java technology named JLinq would have some resemlence to Microsoft's LINQ technology. It's not only the same acronym, but it stands for the same thing in both technologies: "Language Integrated Query". But while Microsoft's LINQ, is a query language integrated into the programming language (go figure), IBM's LINQ is a code generator integrated into an IDE. WTF?

These kinds of projects are not just an embarrassment to IBM, but might be harmful to the Java community as well. Too many Java developers are completly ignorant of advancements outside thier own community. This kind of confusion isn't helpful. How many developers are going to assume this is a Java port of LINQ, and judge LINQ on the merits of IBM's 3rd rate Eclipse plugin?

posted by Bryan at 8:39 PM