Re: Increased company involvement

[Thomas Hallgren <thhal(at)mailblocks(dot)com>]

Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> > However, there was a lot of coordination that happened with Fujitsu that
> > I don't see happening with the current companies involved.  Companies
> > are already duplicating work that is also done by community members or
> > by other companies.
>
>
> That is bound to happen no matter what. Look at plJava and plJ. Some 
> people just feel that their way is better. Some people just don't get 
> along etc...
Actually, I think that PL/Java versus PL/J is a good example of where 
some coordination would have helped a lot.

The short story:
I was between jobs in December 2003 through February the following year. 
A lot of work on PL/Java was made during that time. I had no clue that 
there was another active project with similar objectives until after my 
first fully functional submission to gborg. Had I known, the outcome 
would have been different. Today there are ongoing and very active 
efforts to collaborate.

The longer story (if anyone is interested):
Before I started PL/Java I informed the community of my intentions (see 
hackers thread "pljava revisited" 
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2003-12/msg00310.php ). I 
got a lot of feedback and good advice such as using C instead of C++, 
hosting the project at gborg, etc. but nobody told me back then that 
there was an active PL/J project. I found traces of that project on 
sourceforge but it seemed to have been dead for over a year. At that 
time there was no redirect from sourceforge.

Jan Wieck started the thread "PL/Java issues" 
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2003-12/msg00819.php in 
which I made 2 major posts. Nothing in that thread indicated that there 
was an ongoing project and I got no reply to my posts. On January the 
7th, I made my first submission to gborg.

When I, in mid February, realized that the PL/J project was indeed alive 
and active, I wrote the "PL/Java - next step?" 
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2004-02/msg00713.php where 
I outlined possible futures for PL/Java and PL/J. The outcome of that 
was that PL/J  (Dave Cramer and Laszlo Hornyak) and I had an IRC meeting 
where we agreed on some limited collaboration (see "Minutes from Pl/Java 
-next step IRC" 
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2004-03/msg00171.php ).

From that point and until a month or so ago, the active collaboration 
between the projects could have been better. Some things did happen 
though. Laszlo asked me to publish some PL/Java interfaces in a public 
maven repository which I did and we had some discussions. I made an 
attempt to have a major sponsor step in and take the lead in a project 
aiming to provide a flexible solution where a choice of approach could 
be made but the sponsor understandably wanted to wait and see.

Today, we (the PL/Java and PL/J project members) make common efforts to 
factor out client tools that indeed can be common to a separate project. 
We are also discussing how to make the PostgreSQL user experience as 
similar as possible and thus allowing use of PL/Java or PL/J without 
changing anything but configuration.

Kind regards,
Thomas Hallgren