Status of JDBC Interface

Ok, after being a little quiet recently things are picking up (well at least
for now).

Anyhow, here's whats happening on the JDBC front:

1) ANT vs Make

As someone (sorry forgotten your name) suggested using ANT instead of Make
for building the driver. Well yesterday was pretty quiet here so I finally
took the plunge and rewrote both the Makefile and its supporting class into
ANT's xml build file.

Lets just say this is definitely the way to go. The size of the Makefile &
CheckVersions.java came to about 19K. build.xml is just over 2K and does
exactly the same thing (and is faster).

The real beauty about ANT is that it's platform independent as it's written
in Java itself. ANT is part of the Apache Jakarta Project, and more details
are available from http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/

So as of last night we now have two methods of compiling the driver:

Method 1: Make make            This builds and runs a test to see which version to
build. If this fails then run one of: make jdbc1        This builds the JDBC1 driver make jdbc2        Build the JDBC2
standarddriver make enterprise    Build the JDBC2 Enterprise driver make examples    Build the JDBC1 & 2 Examples make
examples2   Build the JDBC2 only examples make corba        Build the corba example
 

Method 2: ANT ant            Builds the correct driver dependent on what JDK you
have installed. ant clean        Removes any built classes and jar files ant examples        Builds the examples
correctfor the JDK version in
 
use

I suggest we keep supporting both methods for now to see how people get on.
CVS has an early version of build.xml, but I'm currently refining it today.

2) Versioning

Ok, one problem in the past was keeping the driver uptodate with the correct
version numbers. Before it was stored in three locations. Now back in
October I moved this all into the org.postgresql.Driver class, so there was
one location. Also as suggested on the Hackers list Make now extracts the
version from Makefile.global. This works fine for Make, but there are two
problems.

First, ANT can't read this easily. This isn't that major, but the second one
is. I've had reports that some people checkout just the interfaces, and not
the entire source, so Makefile.global is not available.

Hackers: Any ideas on how to solve this problem? If necessary I'll manually
set it before release so it's not broken, but it needs sorting.

3) Web site

www.retep.org.uk has now moved from Demon to Hub. However I'm having some
problems still, mainly with my linux box at home. It's probably not going to
be before next Wednesday before I get everything backup to speed. I'll try
to get the updates on there, but can't guarantee it at the moment.

4) Email addresses

As of this Friday (22nd December) the petermount@maidstone.gov.uk address
will cease to exist. The peter@maidast.demon.co.uk one should be dead by now
so obviously don't use that one either.

Please only use the peter@retep.org.uk one for contacting me from now on.

Thanks, Peter

-- 
Peter Mount
Enterprise Support Officer, Maidstone Borough Council
Email: petermount@maidstone.gov.uk
WWW: http://www.maidstone.gov.uk
All views expressed within this email are not the views of Maidstone Borough
Council