Re: the future of pljava development

newsy(at)lewczuk(dot)com (Marek Lewczuk) writes:
> Hello everyone,
> I would like to start very important (from my point of view) topic -
> the future of pljava in PostgreSQL development. Thomas Hallgren
> (creator of pljava) has made a great job setting up the project, but
> there are many things to do (e.g. preparing pljava for PostgreSQL 8.3)
> in order to have pljava better and more tightly integrated with
> PostgreSQL. Unfortunately Thomas is not able to continue the
> development so actively as before and people like me are able to help
> only coding things in Java and with testing - people that are fluent
> in C, JNI and PostgreSQL backend are needed. Without that kind of
> people it will be very difficult to continue active development of
> pljava.
>
> I understand that most of PostgreSQL core team aren't fans of Java,
> however ignoring this language (most popular programing language) and
> developers that uses Java in everyday work is not advisable if we want
> to make PostgreSQL more popular. Look at competing RDBMS - Oracle and
> DB2 have very strong support for Java, not only as procedural language
> but in many other areas.
>
> I would like to know your opinion about pljava and its future and
> maybe also there are people among PostgreSQL developers (core team or
> contrib team) that are able to help with the development. We can make
> a survey how many PostgreSQL users would like to use pljava - I'm sure
> that the results would show that it is required to have pljava as one
> of the most important features of PostgreSQL.

At this point in time, a much more important feature of PostgreSQL
would be for version 8.3 to be released. That process is running into
*some* problems vis-a-vis the review process.

The last that I heard, it was somewhat indeterminate whether pljava or
pl/j (a separate project) was the preferred way to provide Java
support.

The fact that Oracle or IBM are marketing their Java support heavily
*does not* imply that it is a good idea for the PostgreSQL project
ought to do the same. We have limited time; taking time from other
things to spend on pljava is quite likely not to be a wonderful idea.
It requires that people whose expertise *isn't* Java spend a lot of
time learning Java details.

If there aren't enough people interested in supporting Java, then it
is by no means evident that anything can or should be done.
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