Hi Dan,
Thanks for responding. Some comments inline...
Daniel John Debrunner wrote:
Dag H. Wanvik wrote:
Bryan Pendleton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Aren't there some pretty good packages for this already? E.g., BDB-JE,
JDBM, Perst, etc.?
JDBM is being incubated as an Apache project.
That would take care any licensing concerns.
Maturity wise, it's unclear to me what state JDBM is in, started at
source forge in 2000 but last release in 2001? I only looked briefly.
The download seems to be around 250k, which could be a better starting
point than Derby. I found a blog entry that said its actual jar file
size was 85k.
Community, well maybe not much community currently around JDBM, but
coming to Apache could change that, especially if folks from Derby got
involved. Seems strange to me for Derby to start up its own lite
project while another is in incubation at Apache. Could be a great
opportunity for two communities to work together rather than against
each other.
For some problems, Apache offers multiple solutions and communities. For
instance, Maven and Ant are both build tools. Here's another example:
Apache is incubating Empire-db now--that's another ORM framework which
will sit alongside Apache JDO and Apache Torque.
It's hard for me to predict how this will play out. However, I don't see
JDBM competing with Derby Lite. The JDBM jarball weighs only 82K. That
suggests to me that it's not packed with features but it's a good fit
for tiny devices. I don't see Derby Lite playing in that space.
If JDBM graduated from incubation at Apache, then why would anyone
want to work on slimming Derby down if there was a working solution
under the same license?
In my mind, footprint is only one of the issues. Derby Lite would be
feature-rich, high performance, and multi-user. For instance, Derby's
multi-column keys would be an interesting differentiator. So would
replication.
A lot of new databases are cropping up these days. Different problem
spaces are demanding very specific solutions. I think that JDBM and
Derby Lite will find different sweet spots.
Regards,
-Rick
Dan.
