[hibernate-dev] Wishing to work on Hibernate's DDL capabilities

[Steve Ebersole]

On Thu, 2009-06-11 at 22:30 +0200, Francis Galiegue wrote:
> 
> This is what I really want to achieve, though. I'm close to it, really
> close. The Dialect API, as it exists today, only lacks a few pieces
> and logical separation to make it easier and fully functional. And it
> is of high interest for our application, which requires that mappings
> be dynamic, with no downtime (POJOs are out of the question for such a
> setup, though, or so I believe, since the ability to compile generated
> code on the fly is only really integrated with Java 1.6 - but I don't
> use POJOs...)
You must realize that this "splitting" is simply cosmetic; it is not
adding any new feature.  I was simply considering this because I like
tidiness in the form of encapsulation.  

As an illustration, take the case of sequences.  A dialect's sequence
support is really twofold (provided it supports sequences at all):
1) How do we manage them (obtain information about them from the data
dictionary and create/drop them)?
2) How do we query them for nextvals?

So we have a design decision.  Do we split them the way you suggest
(which imo is a bit contrived) and say that sequence-management
meta-info is part of the "ddl dialect"?  Or do we encapsulate the
dialect's support of sequences into a contract unto itself
(SequenceSupport)?

> 
> I'll come up with specific questions over the weekend concerning the
> existing code (I use 3.3.1), since some parts remain really obscure to
> me. I can then come up with proposals, which, I believe, will have to
> be JDK 1.4 compliant, right?
1.4, correct.  Also, if the work is "significant" we will need a signed
contributor agreement to be able to accept the contribution:
http://www.jboss.org/contribute/contributions/index.seam

> 
-- 
Steve Ebersole <steve at hibernate.org>
Hibernate.org