- The idea of Cayenne was conceived back in 2001 by a few programmers in Atlanta, USA. The goal was to build an open source ORM framework (those were non-existent on the market back then). The design was inspired by NeXT/Apple Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF).
- In the fall of 2002 Cayenne 1.0 alpha was successfully used in production on NHL.com site. First official stable release was announced in September 2003. Since then Cayenne has been deployed by many small and big organization sthroughout the globe.
- In the spring of 2006 Cayenne was accepted to the Apache Software Foundation Incubator with the goal to become an Apache project.
- In December of 2006 Cayenne became a top-level Apache project.