Made the initial CVS import of Grafolia to the Apache DB Project commons-sandbox this Saturday night (what an exciting night!). Grafolia is designed to be a general-purpose unit of work library for Java object graphs. Its specific need is in OJB, however it's not dependent on anything aside from Java 1.2. I hope to see it be useful to other tools which need to manage transactional object graphs.
When I posted the first proof of concept ideas I was asked why it doesn't implement JTA callbacks in order to be managed as a resource. It still doesn't, and I don't think it will. The reason here is that this library will, probably, typically be used on top of another tool which provides the object graphs, and manages transactions. Right now I am focusing on OJB, but once that is solid I want to use an XML:DB backend. The resource which it manages object graphs for should be the JTA resource, I think.
An argument can be made to provide the hooks and making it a first-class transaction system, but it isn't -- it simply does state, state management, graph analysis, attach/detach, flushing, and rollbacks for other transactional systems which want to provide Java object projections. Keep it simple =)
The code should probably be considered fairly fluid at the moment as I am working on optimizing it. Right now it works refelctively, with easy hooks for non-reflective state tracking. The flushing algorithm is designed around the reflective system though -- and I want to find a more optimal solution when fully instrumented graphs are being managed. Right now instrumenting will definately give a performance boost, but the algorithms usable when *everything* is instrumented are different then when some of the graph is instrumented, or none. Finding a good way to mix this to optimize it for whatever situation it finds itself in will be fun.
Oh yeah, no XML =) If you want to change default behavior I took a point from Rod and designed it to be easy to make small component changes for a specific environment rather than try to guess every variation and make the right knobs available in configuration.