David Van Couvering 's Blog

June 2006 Archives

Dabbling with DabbleDB

When I wrote my blog about Google Spreadsheets, one of the comments referred me to DabbleDB. Well, I took a look, and it is very nice! I love its intuitive interface and how easy it is to get up and running, both with a new database and with importing. I highly recommend viewing the video of the demo.

They way they handle schema evolution is wonderful, and there are a lot of opportunities for some very interesting collaboration. Very cool that you can export to RSS and it looks like in the future to Atom. It is also pretty amazing this is all happening in a web browser; I often forgot that was what I was in and was treating it like a regular app. A sign of a very well written AJAX application.

I tried and tried to find out if they had support for storing the data offline, but couldn't find anything. Does anyone have any info on this?

I did look at the privacy policy, and I have to admit after all the news of data getting stolen and compromised, it didn't give me a warm fuzzy. No discussion of security auditing; no discussion of how they are securing your data; no clear ability to ensure that your data has been removed completely when you want it removed. Hmm...

I had thought of maybe using it to quickly create some apps for my personal data, but found myself backing off from putting my data on their server. It appears that their focus is on SMBs, but would SMBs want to put their business data online like this? I also found myself not wanting to pay the monthly fee; I do hope they can find another business model that doesn't require the consumer to pay. Maybe they could make it free up to 10MB of data or something. Otherwise I'm concerned that they just won't get the uptick I think they deserve.

I was also very curious what their back-end architecture looked like, but when I went to their corporate web site I could only find a blog. Some very nicely written JavaScript (I love this Firefox plugin to view all the JavaScript included files), but I couldn't find my way through to see how and where they are storing the data.

So, this is a very nice interface, and I'd love to use it while storing my data locally. I may still use it for some collaborative data, but it would have to be worth the price...

How do *you* pronounce Derby?

One problem with the name Derby for the Apache database project is that it has at least two common pronunciations. Working with folks from the UK, Norway, India and US, we actually hear many more pronunciations.

Jean Anderson, one of the Derby committers, finally put up a Wiki page with recordings of Derby pronunciations. Fun page. I'd put my pronunciation up, but it's pretty close to Jean's (although she definitely does sound like she's from Minnesota, eh?).

If you think your pronunciation is different, record it, and put it up! I'd like to see how many different pronunciations there are.

Java DB is bundled in Mustang

Well, finally. I've been chomping at the bit on this one for quite a while. I can now officially announce that Java developers will have the convenience of a fully functional, 100% Java database shipping with the Sun JDK. Java DB 10.2 will be available with Mustang (Sun's JDK for Java SE 6) later today or tomorrow as part of the JDK bundles for build 88, available at http://download.java.net/jdk6/binaries/.

Of course this is exciting for me as a developer on Java DB. But I also think this is a great thing for Java developers. Out of the box you have a database that you can build and test against that implements the latest version of JDBC, and which, if you so choose, you can take and deploy your application with, free of charge. And if need support, you can get it.

You will find it under the db directory of your JDK install. You do need to be aware that the version of Java DB that is included in these builds is an alpha version, and that databases you create with this version are not upgradable to the production version that will ship with the GA release of Mustang. But you can start playing around with it and run tests against it starting today (or tomorrow).

As a reminder, this is Sun's redistribution of Apache Derby. There is a web page for Java DB, but all the community work (and we would love you to participate in this community) is done at the Apache Derby web site. We'd love to hear from you. Sign up on the derby-user alias; join the #derby IRC channel; ask questions, give us feedback. The community is very active and you get quick responses from Derby developers and users. It's free, it's open source, and now it's part of the JDK.

Google Browser Sync, Java DB and SunRays

A great article from David Berlind about the Synchronized Web, Java DB, and Google Browser Sync. I loved his plugs for Java DB :). Hey, Francois, did you know you were “Mr. Java DB?”

I do think it's important to recognize that with Google Browser Sync, your personal information is kept on the Google server. With a JavaDB "Local AJAX" solution, your personal information is kept with you. Depending on what you want, one may be more preferable to the other. If you want to collaborate and do read/write web kind of work, then keeping your data on the server is good. If it's just your data and you want to keep control over it, then keeping it on your own devices I think makes more sense.

At Sun, we use a technology called the SunRay that is conceptually similar to Google Browser Sync, except that it “synchronizes” your entire desktop. It took some getting used to, but I actually really like it. I can plug my Java-enabled key card into any Sun Ray on any campus, and tada!, there is my session, just as I left it.

SunRay is a “thin client” machine – a terminal with a connection to a server and that's it. It's very similar to the old tty terminals, except that it's a real GUI and each user gets their own disk space and settings on the server. This is a favorite for companies with a large set of users using computers – you can upgrade the software centrally and everyone has access to it, and the terminals are cheap both in terms of cost and power consumption. Cote over at RedMonk has a nice article about SunRays and Google Browser Sync. If you want to find out more about SunRays, you can look here and here.

Google spreadsheets in trouble - and Java DB can help

As I suspect many of you have noticed, Google has announced an online spreadsheet. And as you also may have noticed, the response hasn't been all positive. See here. And here. And here. There's a theme here: nice idea, but why would my spreadsheet data to Google? They can give all the promises of privacy they want, the trust factor just isn't there. There is also the complaint that it is limited in features, but that's solvable over time. The security/privacy concern – that won't go away, and is an issue for a number of web app wannabes.

I think this is a perfect example of why you need offline storage for Web 2.0 applications. If you were to take the the Google Spreadsheet and enable offline storage, you've removed a major barrier to entry. You get the convenience and power of web applications, without having to put your data on the web. All your spreadsheet data stays safely on your machine, under your control.

This solution would of course use Java DB :). Seriously, Java DB is portable (you can use the same standard JDBC API across XP, Solaris, Linux, even PDAs and phones supporting CDC), it's secure, it maps very well to spreadsheet data, it is transactional and has automatic crash recovery. It also comes with a strong community and solid support when you need it. I suppose you could write it using your own storage APIs, but why would you want to?

Hey, Google, come talk to us, I think we can help you out! :)

Pluggable Java Persistence

Some great news coming out of Glassfish: their Java Persistence implementation is now separately downloadable and can be used in other environments, such as Geronimo. Actually, it can be used in any J2SE application. Also, other Java Persistence implementations can be run in Glassfish. We appear to have a pluggable persistence architecture for Java – very nice!

I'm personally going to investigate using Java Persistence in the browser, as a nicer (and more portable) programmatic layer than JDBC for doing persistence in the browser.

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