When I went through and made the “A Brief History of Java and JDBC” movie, I spent a lot of time thinking about the current and future state of Java. This made me realize how much Java has had to change since its inception to keep up with the constant pace of change and innovation in the software world. What’s interesting is that while Java and Java-based technologies have grown and evolved with these changes, JDBC driver architecture types really haven’t. In fact, it’s been over 10 years since the JDBC driver types 1 through 4 were standardized!
Software architecture and design is in a constant state of flux, and a lot has changed in the past ten years. We’ve seen new social networks (Twitter, Facebook) and major internet companies explode (Google, YouTube). Many of these technologies and companies use Java development, and I can safely say that this development is drastically different from what I was coding back in the day, and the demands placed on businesses, their developers, and their IT departments has radically transformed as well. However, one of the only things that hasn’t changed much was JDBC architecture.
Developers still look at type 4 JDBC drivers and think, “All I need to make sure my application will deploy and run smoothly is a type 4 JDBC driver.” By contrast, what I have been hearing all too often from our customers is that although they are using type 4 JDBC drivers, they are still running into problems in their environments that cause Java development projects to fail, run poorly, or offer limited functionality.
Many of the problems cited by our customers keep coming up. What I have found is that in many cases, it is the type 4 JDBC driver that is the source of the problems. What I have found is that most type 4 JDBC drivers have limitations that make them impractical for a lot of the kinds of Java development taking place today. Ten years ago these wouldn’t be problems, but with the proliferation of new technology, the demands on the driver have continued to climb. Without some information on these limitations, a lot of folks end up missing deadlines, getting frustrated, or worse, dealing with major production headaches – the kind that turn any day into a nightmare.
Unfortunately, not much is being done about these type 4 driver limitations. Rather than wait for someone else to talk about these problems, I’ve decided to spread the word about them myself through a brief, ½ hour webcast next week (Tuesday, February 23rd at 2pm EDT). If you are doing modern day data-driven Java development of any kind, I encourage you to sit in and hear about these limitations and what sort of problems they cause our customers to experience. Just click below to view the webinar recording!
-Jesse
Jesse Davis
As Senior Director of Research & Development, Jesse is responsible for the daily operations, product development initiatives and forward looking research for Progress DataDirect. Jesse has spent nearly 20 years creating enterprise data products and has served as an expert on several industry standards including JDBC, J2EE, DRDA and OData. Jesse holds a bachelor of science degree in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State university.