David Van Couvering 's Blog

March 2006 Archives

The somewhat numbing but important work of building a solid software product

What am I doing with Apache Derby / Java DB right now? I am doing the glamorous work of internationalizing the messages in the client code, while at the same time setting the SQL States approriately for all the SQL Exceptions (currently they are all being set to 'null').

This involves some wonderful drudgery like

• poking through the existing messages for the embedded client and seeing if I can reuse them
• perusing the SQL spec to make sure I use the right SQL State
• running a lint script I wrote to make sure the substitution parameters match the expected parameters
• making sure the message id is loaded correctly
• running tests and fixing master output files on multiple JDKS

and so on and so on.

This is painstaking but important work. This will allow the client messages to be translated, which will make Derby (more) usable by the 98% of the world who doesn't have English as their primary language.

The SQL States seem silly, but applications actually depend on this. Even more so now that JDBC 4 is creating subclasses of SQLException that are defined at least in part by the class of the SQL State for the exception.

In other exciting news, I’ve also been working on this Wiki page where we declare the stability of all our interfaces, inspired by some of the compatibility principles used here in Sun and now documented in Open Solaris. More painstaking work, with lots of debate in the community, but I think this is going to be very valuable and will allow users to build and deploy their apps on Java DB / Derby with confidence that it won’t break from under them.

Java DB available for download!

Great news for the Apache Derby community, and I think for Java in general – Java DB, Sun’s supported distribution of Derby, is now available for download. This is based on the latest release of Apache Derby, version 10.1.1.

If you want to see the new “home” for Java DB, it’s at http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/javadb

Java DB seems to be getting some serious attention. The article that John O’Conner wrote on how to build a desktop application with Java DB using NetBeans made it to the front page of http://java.sun.com.

This is a great step for those of us here at Sun working on Apache Derby. We're hoping that more and more of Sun's products and Sun's customers will start using and deploying with Java DB. I think Apache Derby has great promise and a flourishing community, and now with this supported version it is even easier for users to take this open source database and actually deploy it with confidence, knowing that they can get full support from an established vendor.

Working in a global community

Working on an open source project makes it much more possible for me to work with a global community. And every now and then we run into someone who is dedicated, passionate, and willing to go the extra mile, and is even willing to take the risk of trying on a language that they are not familiar with.

The email quoted below is from someone in Cuba, Yeradis, who is working on a Derby for Dummies guide for about 20 developers he works with. I had to laugh out loud, he got his point across even though English is clearly not his first language:

don't worry i will kill with my custions :-p :-D ;-) to people on Derby Communities ;-)
because if i dont kill somebody on the comunnitie :-p
here in the work will kill me :-( :-p (i mean the other developers in the team ;-) )
the problem is here they assing me a job to take like a hobbie , but this hobbie wuaooo (an expression ) will let me with no hair on head :-p in other words Bald, hairless ;-)

thanks again Jean for your contribution to my cause ;-) and for your patient ;-)

I can only try to imagine the environment Yeradis is working in. I wish I could go visit him some day, but that is pretty unlikely. But the great thing is I get to meet him even though he's far away, speaking a different language and in a completely different cultural setting.

Thanks, Yeradis, for helping me connect with the world outside of my little hovel here in Berkeley.

Derby and Amazon S3?

So, my JavaOne session on Derby that I’m doing with Dan Debrunner got approved, and I just submitted the slides. In the slides I committed to doing a demo showing how to use Derby on a memory stick. I have a bunch of ideas of what I might do with this, but one that’s got me kind of curious is somehow integrating data stored in the newly announced Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

The problem I’m having is that the S3 schema is so basic – just keys and values. It makes me wonder if I should add a new storage plugin to Derby that runs on top of S3, so that it could be queryable. Or maybe I could find a way to cache S3 data locally in Derby and synchronize it on some kind of regular basis, or on demand. Now, that could be cool. Use S3 as an Internet backup for my database on a stick...

What do you think?

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