Re: Increased company involvement

Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>> 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...
>
Actually, I think that PL/Java versus PL/J is a good example of where
some coordination would have helped a lot.

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