Happy Birthday to MyBatis - 10 years

10 years ago today, the very first version of MyBatis was released to the public.  Then called "The iBATIS Database Layer", the library wasn't actually released as a separate product on this day.  Rather it was included in JPetStore as the curious persistence library that caught the eye of many Java developers that read the original whitepaper.

It was originally posted on TSS: http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=14243

The white paper that started it all is here:  http://www.clintonbegin.com/downloads/JPetStore-1-2-0.pdf

After seeing the reaction from the community I released the persistence framework separately on a private server, and eventually on SourceForge about 6 months later. You can still go and grab version 1.1 if you like:

http://ibatisdb.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ibatisdb/ibatisdb/

Not long after that, I was at a conference in New York where I met Ted Husted.  He educated me on the merits of the Apache Software Foundation and invited me to submit iBATIS to the Apache Incubator project, and ultimately we became a TLC.  We spent about 6 years as an Apache project.

All good things come to an end though. We evolved in a different direction than the Apache Software Foundation, and thus the team voted to leave the ASF.  iBATIS is now in the attic at Apache, as you can see by the large red banner at the top of the now retired Apache iBATIS homepage.

http://ibatis.apache.org/

Open source is not without its lawyers, and thus we had to leave the name iBATIS behind with the ASF -- even though we brought it in. Funny how that works.

But no matter, MyBatis was born! It is a more appropriate name anyway, leaving the roots in cryptography behind it. As it turned out - thanks to a number of our creative team members - we ended up with a way cooler logo too!  In addition we grew our team and created a number of sub-projects, all happily hosted at Google Code.  

What does the future hold?  MyBatis 3 is by far the best version ever.  It is the most active, stable and feature rich of any previous release.  This is all thanks to our hard working team.  So why mess with something like that?

Well, my guess is that some of the cool features of Java 8 will open new doors for MyBatis.  The new API possibilities will likely be too tempting to ignore, and thus I would imagine MyBatis 4 will begin sometime after Java 8 arrives.  Whatever the future holds, I hope it's a lot of fun and continues to offer a great deal of value to our users.

Cheers,
Clinton