Concise Object Relational Architecture
COBRA is an object persistence layer / application server written in the Java programming language. It is uses relational database technology to provided the persistent storage mechanism; however the store is fully encapsulated shielding programmers from the details of relational database access.
History
The original version of COBRA was inspired by the Javaworld article: Reflections on Java, Beans, and relational databases published in September 1997. The current implementation embodies ideas from Scott Ambler's paper on: Mapping Objects To Relational Databases and the sister paper: The Design of a Robust Persistence Layer for Relational Databases.
Development was begun in 1997. This was before Sun Microsystems published the J2EE specification. COBRA is not compliant with J2EE and takes different approaches to solve different problems. With release 1.10 the files mapping COBRA objects to the RDBMS is in XML format and is similar to the J2EE format. There are no plans to migrate to J2EE, if you are looking for a J2EE compliant application server, try JBOSS.
COBRA has been used as the access mechanism for a large customer services database. This was backed by Postgresql then Oracle 8. However only the features required to solve immediate problems have been implemented. Much further work is necessary.
Developments
COBRA is an open source project hosted by SourceForge and is covered by the GNU General Public License. It is provided 'as is'. Anyone can download the source if they find a feature is missing or wish to change the functionality they can do this themselves and even contribute the updates to the master source.
Last Updated: February 12, 2002
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