[Pljava-dev] Focus of the PL-Java Project

> Our vision is currently pretty limited. The pljava project was really a
> one man show of Thomas Hallgren who no longer has the time for it which
> left a pretty big void. Recently I've helped out to update it for the
> 8.3 server release and fix a couple of minor bugs, but at the moment
> it's not really going anywhere.

<delurk>

I have a few plans afoot to make it easier to install. (Although if
it's getting packaged with the windows installer that may be of less
interest to Richard).

The first of these is the modules work that I'm doing for the main
project (see e.g.
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-patches/2008-04/msg00164.php) If
the modules work gets approved and committed, it should be pretty easy
to create a compliant pljava module, and installation should become as
simple as e.g.
yum/apt-get install postgresql-module-pljava
echo "create module pljava" | psql mydb

(A longer term vision is to create wix install files and hence windows
installers automatically for modules, but it should be pretty easy to
just drop a module directory into the appropriate place and have pgsql
pick it up, even after install.)

The second is an idea to dynamically open jvm.so/dll rather than
having to hack the server LD_LIBRARY_PATH or PATH, which is pretty
gross. I have a patch which can do that for a hardcoded dll path, but
it needs to pick that path up out of the config file, and, ideally,
pick up the default JVM installed. On windows that means using the
registry, and unixy distros will have their own default path, so it
would be up to the individual packager.

Then probably tackling the issue of JDBC 4 and getting it to compile
under JDK 6, but that's a way down the path for me at least.

None of that is an official list or anything, Richard, it's just some
stuff that I'm doing.

Cheers

Tom