Matt Sanford wrote:
Hello all,
I agree a UI is nice when you are trying out new dev libraries.
Something so you can quickly evaluate if you want to pursue this or not.
Having said that, I think it's a terrible off-topic use of time to build
a GUI. Derby is a database, and as such should do one thing and do it
very well (even if it is a rather large thing to do). I would suggest
that we just solicit someone like Aqua Data Studio
(http://www.aquafold.com/) to add us to the first-tier list of databases
and point users to that. I only suggest Aqua because it was very
recently asked about on this list and confirmed to work and does have a
personal/educational license. I am sure there are other options I am not
aware of with friendlier licensing that could be made to work well with
Derby.
I think both approaches have merit.
I'm delighted to see anyone with energy contribute effort to developing
a GUI for Derby.
It's also great for existing third-party products to add Derby to their
list of supported databases.
Or perhaps the Apache DB project should start work on a new GUI
outside of the Derby project as part of the maintenance portion of the
mission statement.
If somebody wants to champion a completely new GUI project for Apache
DB, they'd be welcome to speak up. It'd be interesting to see if enough
volunteer interest could be drummed up to sustain such a project.
But I'd like to point out that the Apache DB project already has useful
software that could be used in such an effort.
For example, several DB subprojects provide persistence layers (torque,
ojb, jdo) that get used by other Apache projects (as well as projects
outside Apache) and that could be used for building such a GUI. And, of
course, ddlutils provides services that can be used by these (and more).
As an example off the top of my head of an Apache project that uses DB
subprojects, I'm thinking of Jetspeed because I bumped into some of
those developers at ApacheCon. It uses ojb as the default persistence
layer (see
http://portals.apache.org/jetspeed-2/multiproject/jetspeed-rdbms/) and
includes a Derby installer
(http://portals.apache.org/jetspeed-2/getting-started-installer.html).
So there's a lot of mix and match that can be done with various Apache
projects.
-jean
Just my €0.02
-- Matt Sanford
