jTDS vs. JConnect

[James Watkin]

(I don't mean any disrespect to Sybase by asking these questions. They
need to be asked.)

Now that jTDS is 1.0, what will Sybase's JConnect strategy be going forward?

Will Sybase build JConnect on top of jTDS?

Will Sybase end JConnect development and contribute to jTDS instead?

Does a developer lose anything now, in terms of configuration or
functionality, by switching from JConnect to jTDS now?

- Jim

[Ashish Mahajan]

This is an interesting question you ask. I will forward this to our product
management but so far Sybase strives to support jConnect product. There are
no plans to build jConnect over jTDS/FreeTDS... At the moment we are not
contributing to jTDS...

So the key thing is that if you plan to use the latest features in ASE
12.5.2 or new major releases of ASE, then I would suggest you stick to
jConnect...

HTH,

Ashish

"James Watkin" <james....@anderson.ucla.edu> wrote in message
news:42091954$1@forums-1-dub...

[al...@earthling.net]

Jim,

As Ashish noted this is indeed a very interesting question you are
asking. I am one of the jTDS developers but I must say I am as clueless
as you are about this.

My main focus with jTDS is MS SQL Server and for a long time jTDS was
only developed with MS SQL Server in mind (although it kept its
compatibility with Sybase, via TDS 4.2) but since 0.8 jTDS really tries
to offer as much support for Sybase as for MS SQL Server. There are a
few limitations, such as using client side cursors for Sybase, as
opposed to server side for SQL Server but generally jTDS is better than
both JConnect and especially the crappy MS driver.

(As a matter of fact I remember seeing a similar post to yours
regarding Microsoft and whether they would support jTDS instead of
their driver; of course there was no answer and the way I see it
Microsoft simply doesn't want good interoperability with Java; they
just want people to see that Java is a Bad Thing (TM) and having a half
baked JDBC implementation is a really good way to do it.)

Coming back to Sybase, I don't think they see things the same way
Microsoft does so they would have at least some reasons to support jTDS
and FreeTDS. However it's impossible to say whether they will actually
do it, trusting someone they can not control with providing the
interface to one of the most important development platforms (i.e.
Java). But if they decide to do it, we're here. We have been doing this
for a few years now and we intend to keep doing it for as long as it's
useful for the community.

Alin Sinpalean,
The jTDS Project.