Re: the future of pljava development

Marek Lewczuk wrote:
> I understand that most of PostgreSQL core team aren't fans of Java,
> however ignoring this language (most popular programing language) and
> developers that uses Java in everyday work is not advisable if we want
> to make PostgreSQL more popular. Look at competing RDBMS - Oracle and
> DB2 have very strong support for Java, not only as procedural language
> but in many other areas.

Being a fan or not of the language really isn't the issue, and nobody is
*ignoring* the language and platform. We all know "the others" have it.
And we want it. But the core team (or more importantly in this case, the
people doing backend development, which is partially a different thing)
aren't *java programmers* (at least not good ones, AFAIK), so they
really can't do much there. This is one of the reasons we have the
pl/java project separately - to make it possible to have people focus on
what they know and are good at.

Oh, and both DB2 and SQLServer has .Net support for stored procedures,
and we don't have that at all - so you could make an equally strong
argument that the core people should focus on that. Which has even less
chance of happening :-)

> I would like to know your opinion about pljava and its future and maybe
> also there are people among PostgreSQL developers (core team or contrib
> team) that are able to help with the development.

If you (or whomever picks up where the project is at now) have any
specific issues wrt the backend integration and such things, there are a
lot of people on the -hackers list that will be happy to help out. But
since most of us aren't Java people, you're probably going to have to
look elsewhere if you need help with the Java parts.

> We can make a survey
> how many PostgreSQL users would like to use pljava - I'm sure that the
> results would show that it is required to have pljava as one of the most
> important features of PostgreSQL.

We did have one not too long ago. It showed that about 14% of our users
did, which puts it in fourth place, after perl, php and python. But not
far behind. See http://www.postgresql.org/community/survey.44

So saying that it's one of the most important features is definitely
wrong. Saying it's important or very important is absolutely not wrong.

//Magnus