Working with JDK part1
In a rather perplexing move, it’s announced that the Java 6 JDK will include Derby, the turdy little unwanted IBM poop plopped onto Apache (about par for the course, since large swathes of Apache seem to exit solely as an IBM marketing tool.)
What’s perplexing about this decision is how incredibly arbitrary it seems. I have yet to see a single rational justification of its inclusion, even from within Sun or from the community at large.
It’s one thing to suffer from the tyranny of the masses. We have plenty of cases of that in Javaland, do we really need to now add arbitrary bizarre decisions that not only pop up out of nowhere, but also have nothing at all do with the community?
Honestly, not even the JDK6 Expert Group decided on this addition. It’s literally as if someone at Sun woke up one day and thought ‘you know, I miss the old days when we could add random shit to the jdk without all this community and expert group nonsense, I’m going to sexually arouse myself now by doing just that’, in one of the most harmful public displays of nostalgia ever seen in a technical forum.
I honestly cannot conceive of a single reason for this. It doesn’t even make life easier for anyone. You can’t rely on it being there since it’s not in the JRE, you can’t actually do anything with it since you have to ram various awkwardly shaped objects into unexpected orifices to create a db and manage it using derby’s amateurish and unpleasant tools. It’ll work out of the box much the same way as an Oracle 8 install CD can be considered functional.
Now you’ll have to bend over and invite over a large group of chocolate log miners and perform things your mother would be very upset about just to upgrade your db. Of course, you WILL want to upgrade it. It has hundreds of open issues, and is clearly labeled alpha.
Even if those issues are miraculously addresses in the next few months, we’d still end up with more IBM shit in the JDK. Honestly, when will people finally realise that IBM has never produced anything of worth, beyond genius marketers? How many times must I mention java.util.Calendar and java.text before people start listening?
