Today, we received Oracle. They were coming to speak about their business Intelligence offer, Oracle Application Server and so on.

When speaking about Toplink, the guy said something like: "We could say Toplink is kind of a father to Hibernate. Obviously, it's already almost 15 years of existence." Well, why not. Though I didn't see any article interviewing Gavin King confirming that, but apart from reusing their ideas or not, Toplink was here before, OK.

The assertion that surprised me was another one, something like: As Toplink is older than Hibernate, it's obviously more robust and has more functions.

Well, I'm not sure I would agree with this one. In fact, as Toplink Essentials was only released in the OpenSource world very recently (may 2006 in Glassfish, so the JPA implementation even more, if I'm right), and experts seems to agree that about 90% of the projects today use Hibernate for the persistance layer (Didier Girard says it in the TV4IT Webcast. I think this is more of a feeling for him, so if anybody has some statistics about, I'm very interested. I should also ask Sami Jaber for his feeling about it.).

Webcast (in french, see about 9/10 of the video for the Hibernate is 90% of the current projects) :

So, what is the right indicator about software robustness?

Is this the software that's been released fifteen years ago, used by 10 people around the word since this time, or is this this other one, that's been released 6 years ago, used by 90 people since then? Who was the most testable? The one that only few people could download to give it a try, or the one that's been downloaded and tested tons of time by a lot different people?

In my opinion, but I also agree I only know Hibernate, I'm pretty sure Hibernate has already been thoroughly tested. At least, as much as Toplink has. My point is that the maturing of Hibernate was a lot quicker than Toplink's one. Once more, it would be very interesting to put numbers in the debate. Hibernate has been opensourced since its start, so it always benefited from code reviews, patches and so on, and evolved very quickly.

To sum up, because of the fundamental differences between both development styles, I'm not sure that today Hibernate is still behind Toplink speaking about robustness, functions scope and so on. Though I'd be delighted to learn about interesting differences, if you know about it.