- Draft
- Proposed for: Jaybird 5
- Feature-Specification
Since its inception, Jaybird has been built around the Java Connector
Architecture (JCA). As a result, Jaybird has a hard dependency on JCA for its
internals, as well as being able to use Jaybird as a JCA provider. Jaybird 4 and
earlier rely on the connector-api-1.5 (JCA 1.5, which is several versions
behind).
The hard dependency on JCA causes deployment problems, either by users
forgetting to include the JCA dependency, or - for example - using the
jaybird-full library on JavaEE/JakartaEE application servers which reject
libraries including packages from the javax.* namespace.
Given lack of usage of JCA by users of Jaybird (and in general), it is unclear whether Jaybird correctly implements JCA. It is also making code changes harder, as it is not always clear if certain behaviour or structure is required or necessary for JCA.
With moving the stewardship of Java EE to Eclipse and the JakartaEE project, next versions of JCA will change their package naming, which could make it harder to use Jaybird correctly.
Jaybird 5 will remove JCA support, and remove connector-api-1.5 from its
dependencies.
To make a clean break, the current org.firebirdsql.jca package will be renamed
to org.firebirdsql.jaybird.xca, and the entire package will be classified as
an internal API of Jaybird.
Code changes will be made to remove the dependency on JCA, either by introducing
similar interfaces, exceptions, etc, or by refactoring to eliminate some parts
of JCA where this makes sense (eg replace the use of ResourceException with
for example SQLException).
We have considered making JCA an optional dependency of Jaybird by making the current JCA implementation 'JCA-free' and moving it to a different package (this is similar to the current decision), and then providing a new JCA implementation in its place that utilizes this internal 'JCA-free' implementation.
Given the lack of response on the announcement to remove JCA support, and the overall lack of bugs or questions reported against the JCA provider itself, we assume that Jaybird is not (or hardly ever) used as a JCA provider. Investing time to provide a JCA implementation would then seem to be a poor use of our limited development time.
This is a decision that can be revisited in the future if there appears to be a demand after all.
Jaybird 5 and higher will not offer JCA support. Users of Jaybird using JCA will either need to stay on Jaybird 4, or switch to libraries that wrap JCA support around a JDBC driver.
Jaybird 5 will no longer depend on connector-api-1.5.jar, and the
jaybird-full artifact will be dropped from the zip-distribution.
Third-party code relying directly on org.firebirdsql.jca will break.
This change will introduce some backwards compatibility issues in the
org.firebirdsql.jdbc package, as some of the classes and interfaces return.
accept or throw classes from org.firebirdsql.jca or javax.resource,
however as these are generally intended as internal API, this backwards
incompatibility will be limited.
Removing JCA support will make it simpler to evolve code in Jaybird, and hopefully allow us to reduce complexity.