[JDBC] Ant installation (and other) issues!

[Per-Olof Norén]

Hi all, I have been listening to the discussions about Ant and the build system. I think that the discussion is missing a point, which I will try to make here :-)   1. Standard The Ant build system is making its way to be a "de facto" standard for building java applications as it is built for the purpose.   2. Integration In the apache cocoon project, the ant build system jar is shipped along with the distribution and does not require a separate installation of Ant on the target system.  The Ant shell script is customized so that the JAVA_HOME environment is the only parameter to set.  In the case of postgreSQL driver this could be done by invoking the "pgcustom" ant build from the gnu configure/make when configuring with the "--with-java" parameter.   3. Platforms I´m sure everyone agrees that providing a working java compiler should be out of scope for the build system. Since the ant jar is shipped along, with its own build scripts (.bat and .sh) the build of the driver need not to differ for the platform used.   4. Other things not particulary related to the build The build script should, IMHO, NOT replace good implementation and structured design of the driver packages.     A little note on the server and the driver as a substitute for Oracle. Everytime a get a chance, I spread the word of this wonderful database and people wonder "why not MySQL?" I tell them to look a the benchmarking test made by different users, to look at the SQL 9x compliance and to realize the size of the devel community for pgsql and the jdbc driver. As the postgis project evolves with its spatially enabling extension to the driver,  the driver´s  compliance to the API compared to commercial  dmses will be IMHO one of the success factors for providing a rock solid open source alternative. I Can´t help it, I Just love this Server AND Driver.   Thanx for listening :-)   Per-Olof Norén Stockholm