Standards: Pros and cons

It’s widely accepted that it’s a good idea to use standards in software applications. But is this really true?

Let’s take JPA (1.0) vs Hibernate as an example. A lot of people use Hibernate as JPA implementation in their project. The idea is that one can easily switch to another ORM framework that implements JPA.
That sounds as a very good pro but what is the chance that within that specific project another implementation than Hibernate will be used? Why would you want to change?

Standards are made to introduce a general way of working. If you know JPA you don’t have to learn specific implementations like Hibernate, iBATIS or TopLink . That’s true. But what if the standard doesn’t support everything that a specific implementation can do? Will you still use the standard even if you lose some features? In my opinion the answer to that question is definitely ‘no’!

Did you ever try to make use of delete-orphan with JPA? You just can’t do that for the simple reason that it’s not supported by JPA. Solution: use the Hibernate implementation instead.

Another example: Criteria API. You can use Hibernate’s Criteria API for retrieving entities from the DB. It’s not included in JPA. Same for Hibernate Validator. It’s not (yet) included in JPA. So we still use Hibernate specific code.

I know it’s included in JPA 2 but to be honest, how long will it take till a lot of projects will use JPA 2? It can take some time until a new version of some framework will be adopted by a lot of people. The point is that standards seem like a good idea but most of the time not enough features are available at the time the first stable version is released. They’re immature at the moment a lot of people start using them. Which means that the introduction of a lot of standards comes too late.

In my opinion standards can be useful in a long-term project subject to a lot of change like a framework or something similar. But in most of the fixed price software projects an immature standard can be contraproductive instead of generating a lot of added value.