QueryDSL vs. jOOQ. Feature Completeness vs. Now More Than Ever

This week, Timo Westkämper from QueryDSL has announced feature completeness on the QueryDSL user group, along with his call for contributions and increased focus on bugfixes and documentation.

Timo and us, we have always been in close contact, observing each other’s products. In the beginning of jOOQ in 2009, QueryDSL was ahead of us.

But we learned quickly and removed all of our shortcomings such that jOOQ and QueryDSL were quickly at eye level by 2011. Ever since, we have been taking inspiration from one another, as in the end, we have had similar goals. Today, whenever someone is looking for a querying DSL, people tend to recommend either of our tools:

@sandromancuso #querydsl and #jooq seem to be popular choices if you want control over your own mapping.—
Richard Warburton (@RichardWarburto) May 26, 2014

QueryDSL is often a good choice in JPA-based environments, while jOOQ is mostly the best choice in SQL-based environments, although jOOQ has already been given some credit in JPA-based environments as well:

Loved the type safety of @JavaOOQ today. OpenJPA is the workhorse and @JavaOOQ is the artist :) #80/20—
Alessio Harri (@alessioh) May 23, 2014

Anyway, today, we’d like to congratulate Timo to his new job, and to QueryDSL’s feature completeness.

jOOQ, on the other hand, is far from feature complete.

jOOQ is what SQLJ should have been from the beginning.

We’re only at the beginning. Java and SQL are the two platforms that are used by most of the developers on this planet. According to db-engines.com, almost every popular DBMS is a SQL-based relational DBMS. According to TIOBE, Java currently ranks #2 among all languages.

We strongly believe that all of these developers are in dire need for better SQL integration into the Java language. While ORMs and JPA are very well integrated, SQL is not, and that is what we are working on. jOOQ will be feature complete when the Java compiler can natively compile actual SQL code and SQL code fragments into jOOQ, which will serve as its backing AST model for further SQL transformation.

Until we reach that goal, we’ll be adding support for more SQL goodness. A small selection of things that we already support, beyond QueryDSL’s “feature completeness”: