[jboss-as7-dev] (JDBC) Driver Registry

[David M. Lloyd]

On 05/09/2011 09:53 AM, Heiko Braun wrote:
>
> On May 9, 2011, at 4:49 PM, Andrig Miller wrote:
>
>>
>> One problem we have is distribution of the drivers.  For the open source drivers, its not a problem, but for close source drivers I don't believe their licenses allow us to distribute them, so that could be one impediment to doing this, as I assume that we would need to distribute the drivers within the registry.
>>
>> I really like this idea in general, but it may be limited in usefulness if we cannot do it for close source data sources.
>>
>> Do you think we could attempt to grab the strings right from the jar file MANIFEST.MF, and the META-INF/services?  In looking at the MySQL and PostgreSQL drivers I have installed, it would work for MySQL, but not for PostgreSQL.  Not sure about other drivers.  The PostgreSQL driver jar files MANIFEST.MF file doesn't contain the version information like MySQL does, but perhaps if the closed source drivers have such information, we could get the Postgres guys to add it.
>>
>> Andy
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>
>
> I do not necessarily mean that we need to distribute the driver binaries,
> although that came to my mind as well.
>
> What I mean is a registry for drivers that are (manually) deployed or registered as modules.
> However that enter the domain I would need to be able to query the domain API to retrieve a list
> of available drivers including the driver class, name and version.

Yeah there's absolutely nothing stopping us from recognizing JDBC driver 
types and knowing what defaults make sense for them, and how to work 
around their various problems; I think this would add a lot of value.

Querying the domain for JDBC drivers doesn't really make a lot of sense 
IMO.  You could support querying the domain for drivers configured via 
profiles, I suppose, but again that really makes sense at the profile 
level only.  Querying for deployed driver types doesn't seem too useful 
to me either.  I think that it's more important in this case to reflect 
the model as it really is and not try to create the illusion of some 
representation that isn't even possible.
-- 
- DML