Tuesday, December 30th, 2003

I've been playing around with axion a little bit tonight for a java project- it seems pretty nice. It's an embedable relational database (sql) that I'll use as a data store- and it's distributed under a BSDish license so it's commercial friendly. In fact, it just got picked up by the Apache Software Foundation as a new project (according to it's news page). That's definitely good.

I started using hsqldb for this project but something about it didn't sit right with me. I didn't think it could handle the amount of data I needed to put in a single column according to the docs... Anyway I've compiled axion out of CVS and have got it up and running- it's got support for sequences (ya!) and even has this little bit of neatness:

create sequence if not exists my_seq;

create table if not exists my_table ( some_id integer default my_seq.nextval, some_name varchar(256) not null );

So I can go ahead and execute those commands, and if the tables already exist I don't have to worry about catching errors or anything. I've yet to see that feature in a database engine, but it's something that just makes sense. From an embeded point of view anyway. (Update: Daniel Von Fange informs me that MySQL has this also)

Bah, I'm starting to get on a little java kick again... must... resist...

(Ok- here's my official stance on java- it's great for server applications, but it sucks for GUI stuff. And for the server apps, I tend to stay away from most of the J2EE crap- although I do like servlets and jsp's (most of the time))

-- posted 10:08 pm