Actually, I think that PL/Java versus PL/J is a good example of where some coordination would have helped a lot.However, there was a lot of coordination that happened with Fujitsu that I don't see happening with the current companies involved. Companies are already duplicating work that is also done by community members or by other companies.
That is bound to happen no matter what. Look at plJava and plJ. Some people just feel that their way is better. Some people just don't get along etc...
The short story:
I was between jobs in December 2003 through February the following year. A lot of work on PL/Java was made during that time. I had no clue that there was another active project with similar objectives until after my first fully functional submission to gborg. Had I known, the outcome would have been different. Today there are ongoing and very active efforts to collaborate.
The longer story (if anyone is interested):
Before I started PL/Java I informed the community of my intentions (see hackers thread "pljava revisited" http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2003-12/msg00310.php ). I got a lot of feedback and good advice such as using C instead of C++, hosting the project at gborg, etc. but nobody told me back then that there was an active PL/J project. I found traces of that project on sourceforge but it seemed to have been dead for over a year. At that time there was no redirect from sourceforge.
Jan Wieck started the thread "PL/Java issues" http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2003-12/msg00819.php in which I made 2 major posts. Nothing in that thread indicated that there was an ongoing project and I got no reply to my posts. On January the 7th, I made my first submission to gborg.
When I, in mid February, realized that the PL/J project was indeed alive and active, I wrote the "PL/Java - next step?" http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2004-02/msg00713.php where I outlined possible futures for PL/Java and PL/J. The outcome of that was that PL/J (Dave Cramer and Laszlo Hornyak) and I had an IRC meeting where we agreed on some limited collaboration (see "Minutes from Pl/Java -next step IRC" http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2004-03/msg00171.php ).
From that point and until a month or so ago, the active collaboration between the projects could have been better. Some things did happen though. Laszlo asked me to publish some PL/Java interfaces in a public maven repository which I did and we had some discussions. I made an attempt to have a major sponsor step in and take the lead in a project aiming to provide a flexible solution where a choice of approach could be made but the sponsor understandably wanted to wait and see.
Today, we (the PL/Java and PL/J project members) make common efforts to factor out client tools that indeed can be common to a separate project. We are also discussing how to make the PostgreSQL user experience as similar as possible and thus allowing use of PL/Java or PL/J without changing anything but configuration.
Kind regards, Thomas Hallgren
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