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An 'OO' database is just a relational database that includes a notion of inheritance. i.e. PostgreSQL.

No, that is an Object Relational Database.

An OO Database e.g. is http://www.orientechnologies.com/orient-db.htm
or http://www.versant.com/ or ObjectStore or GemStone.

Your previous post screamed for an oo database. Now you say I have no clue ... up to you ;D solve your problems yourself then.

angel'o'sphere

I cannot give you an answer for your particular situation, but I can tell you my opinion, based on my real-world experience.

I am the chief architect for a major application developed by the U.S. State Department, and used by foreign governments for the licensing of hazardous materials.

We use J2EE, and have been since 1999. JBoss is our application server. We used to use Weblogic, and were technically happy with it, but JBoss does everything we need, and has licenses and costs more favorable for our end users.

Our application is a bunch of domain objects and custom business logic, presented by the J2EE server as a bunch of sessions beans (some stateful, some stateless). We have a swing and a web-based client. Most of the rich interaction is done with the swing client, with mostly browsing and canned searching from the web-based client.

We do NOT use Entity beans - and I don't suggest anyone use this part of the EJB specification... For data persistence we use The Versant Object-Oriented Database. For data persistence, I'd recommend this, JDO, or Hibernate talking to the relational database of your choice.

We are very happy with the choices we have made. There is a TON of information out there about J2EE, we are happy with the performance we get, the skills are readily available, and there are plenty of vendors building tools in that space. J2EE is obviously a realistic choice for the kind of work you are doing - and has been for many years.

I do not know much about .NET... only because that isn't where my career has taken me, not because of any dogmatic stance. My major concern about using it for this kind of work is that there is no 'application server'... .NET is tied to the windows platform. I know there are projects like Mono, but realistically, if you are using .NET, you are buying into Microsoft, their tools, and their solutions. With J2EE, I can upgrade my operating system and my application server independently - choose from different vendors for both, play them against each other for cost/support benefits, etc. With .NET, you just won't have these long-term options.

I am the president of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group. While some may say this makes me biased, I'm not an employee of Sun or anything... I work for a relatively small company. I am involved in the NovaJUG because I happen to know and like Java, and like to teach. I also occasionally speak at conferences such as the No Fluff, Just Stuff Software Symposiums. I'm not going to leave my email address or anything, but there is enough info in this to track me down. IF you would like to discuss this further, drop me a line.

Um, OODBMS is not really
that innovative, although I will agree that it is cool. I prefer PostgreSQL myself, but that's because I don't have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on all the commercial databases. *shrugs*

I apologise in advance if Oracle has redefined OODBMS to mean something different than I'm used to it meaning, but at least as much as I know what it is, it's hardly innovative. It's been around a very long time.

I was also under the impression that Sabre make a lot of use of the Versant ODBMS. Pretty advanced stuff.

In addition to the links above, most of the big database systems have active Linux ports. Any Oracle, Sybase, Informix or DB2, InterSystems, Poet, or Versant customer is a potential Linux customer.

those slow RDBMS and start using an object db like Versant to take one example. If you do it right with client side caching the database shouldn't be too much issue.