[GSoC09] Further DB Investigations and Vision updates

Purpose
This entry will be a brief progress report about what I've done thus far. Currently, I have no new discoveries except for coming to terms with using some kind of database. I've also put out a wiki document for Devcathlon's vision, here (in progress).
Thinking about what's best...
During the past week I did some further investigations and decided to revisit Derby's RDBMS. A comment from my last posting, by Austin Ito made me realize the potential flaw to using a non-SQL embedded database. Considering the long-term effects of using a non-SQL DB would likely attribute to less flexibility and portability of a DB system. Especially if future developers of Devcathlon decide on porting its DB to another enterprise DB, this could be a very painstaking and undocumented process. Austin also mentioned about using an ORM, and I might also consider implementing Hibernate. I've been doing a lot of investigative work (mostly reading) on the topic of ORM's and so far I've noted on some benefits. By definition an object/relational mapping supports full object modeling, including the composition, inheritance, polymorphism and peristence. ORM's, like Hibernate are totally transparent (persistent layer), since ordinary classes do not require any special base class or interface implementations. Its also vendor independent, because it abstracts the underlying SQL database and similar SQL dialects out of the application. Although capabilities of a database may differ between systems, you can expect building a more cross-platform application using ORM.
Plans for this week...
Finish Vision document to include technical review and goals for Devcathlon v2.0.
Continue implementing Derby DB and read up on Hibernate. Hibernate and ORM's itself is still a new topic for me, and I'll be interested to hear about any other comments that attribute to using this persistence framework with Derby DB.