> You make a good point about Java not being "portable" (the JVM not
> being fully portable anyways). That could certainly be enough reason
> to not benefit the PostgreSQL community as a whole. It _is_ a shame
> that Java 2 hasn't made it over to other platforms yet.
It will make it to the other platforms eventually, I hope. It's a
shame that Sun's "write once, compile once, run everywhere" promise is
just marketing to some extent.
> Although, I haven't thought about it much, but I'm not sure I see
> any advantages of using Java over PG/plsql. Other than streamlining
> _some_ development since developers in a Java shop would know Java,
> I don't see any language-specific advantages.
pl/pgsql is a great language, I agree. However, java has some
tremendous advantages. The big one is its classes. I needed to do
some DES encryption within the PG database. Well, there's no DES
function in PG, or in pl/pgsql, so I had to write it as a C function
and then link it in. Sure, that works, but the point is, if we had
pl/java, I would just call java.security.encryption.des() (or whatever
it is) and it would be there. Right now I need to do some public key
stuff. I could try to link that all in in C, but that would be a huge
pain. The java standard classes do just about everything. pl/pgsql
will never come close to that.
Also, java is object oriented and more convenient for writing larger
things.