Re: Attention PL authors: want to be listed in template table?

Thomas Hallgren wrote:
> GCJ currently that has limited security. It is 2 years behind
> mainstream in versions (they don't have Java 5 yet and their Java 1.4
> support is not complete). It is not stable and the performance is
> nowhere close to the commercial implementations.

Frankly, that is all FUD. A lot of free software is limited or behind
or claimed to be unstable in some way, but that has never stopped
anyone from using it in the appropriate and expanding niches. Just
look at PostgreSQL. Now, if the commercial Java implementations had
acceptable licensing terms, I would consider using them, but they
don't, so I won't.

> PL/Java is designed to run perfectly safe with a JVM that has the
> correct features implemented. GCJ has serious issues with security
> and I don't see that PL/Java, nor PostgreSQL should make any attempt
> to fix them.

Well, we had a similar discussion about the time when the Python
security support was decreed nonexistent by its author. Clearly,
people still use Python, and people still use PL/Python. It's really
easy to spread a panic by claiming that GCJ has "no security". That's
clearly wrong because GCJ can be used safely in many useful situations.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/