Hello everyone. My name is Donald McLean and I am a software engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore Maryland. I have been using Derby + Hibernate for a couple of personal projects and have recently started using it at work. Those who frequent the Wiki may have noticed my contibution of a simple framework that I created to simplify using Hibernate with Derby.
For months, I have been kicking around a number of problems that I constantly run into and so I have started working on a small project. At Jean's encouragement, I am posting my reasonings for starting this project below. I think that this project is a good use for Hibernate + Derby. I have already started working on it and plan on contributing it to Apache. I would be interested in hearing the thoughts of other members of the Derby community. Take care, Donald ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Why LifeCache? In our modern information driven society, I find myself often unable to locate information that I need and that I have. It may be in an email that I forgot to file or that is not filed in the folder that I expected it to be in or perhaps I need a document on my office computer - or my home computer. Whatever the cause, I need a new way to store, manage and organize the constant flow of information that I want - or need - to keep track of. Specific cases for LifeCache: When I read POP email, it gets downloaded to the computer that I read it on - but I need to be able to move it, or at least access it, on other computers. My email account is getting full, but if I download it to one computer I won't be able to access it on any other computers. My email account is getting full in part because there are obsolete emails filling it up. I want to be able to mark emails so that they will automatically come up for review on a periodic basis, on a certain date or after a certain event has occurred. A new guy has been assigned to my project and I have a collection of documents, notes, callendar entries and emails that he will want to have access to. I want to push a button and grant him access to them - or give him the option to download the whole batch to his computer. I have a long email discussing several topics. I want to be able to associate it with all of those topics without having more than one copy of it. I have an email with a text part and a large attachment. I want to be able to keep everything EXCEPT for the attachment. I have all this information that is related - except that it is scattered amongst text documents, HTML documents, PDF documents, emails, chat logs....... I want change tracking for something that isn't a Microsoft Word document. Maybe it's an email, maybe it's a text document. I don't trust someone else to store my data but now that I have hundreds gigabytes in disk space and high-speed internet access, why should I need to?
