On 29/10/2012 12:41, John Yeary wrote:
Thanks Ulf, that was my exact point Ulf. Although, you were much more
eloquent.
One of the most consistent things that Java has done is ensuring backwards
compatibility. The removal of something like the JDBC-ODBC bridge will
cause issues later. We tell people to upgrade all the time. Security
problems arise and we patch them followed by a message to tell folks to
upgrade. The consumer JRE even has a reminder application which asks them
if they want to upgrade. One click, and their applications stop working.
Although I don't do anything now with MS Access, I see these nice Swing
applications which end up with an Access database. The software that runs a
number of Yoga studios has this configuration. It is the small businesses
which rely on the cheaper Access based applications which will have
problems.
The JDBC-ODBC bridge was a useful stop-gap 10+ years ago when there
wasn't JDBC drivers available for all databases. It has never supported
to my knowledge and the recommendation has always been to use a JDBC
driver for the database. For those that are still using it then they
have another year to find an alternative. I don't think that is too
unreasonable. There will of course be a warning on the download pages
that developers will see. For MS Access there are several JDBC drivers
available, many of which support JDBC 4.1. There are also other
alternatives such as MySQL or Derby available that might be better anyway.
I think your point about communities or developers that have been using
it and aren't reading download pages, release notes or blogs is valid
concern. Any help reaching out to those communities would be appreciated.
As regards releasing the source code then this is easier said than done.
The JDBC-ODBC bridge came from a third-party originally. To be honest I
don't think it's worth the cost and effort anyway as it's completely
obsolete. If folks really see a need for this then it provides an
opportunity to start up a new project to develop a modern JDBC-ODBC bridge.
-Alan
