Re: OpenDocument format for databases

[Jaroslaw Staniek <js@iidea.pl>]

Hello, again.
As you can see below I am referring to (very old) Frank's post. In 2005 we've 
worked on adding connection-data related elements to ODF 1.2 and the effect 
was very positive to me.
At the time I criticized inclusion of java-dependent elements in the database 
parts of the ODF specs, that is now at the 1.2 draft 7 stage.

Please take a look:

Frank Schönheit - Sun Microsystems Germany said the following, On 2005-06-29 
16:30:
> For instance, the java-driver-class is a driver-setting (which to me
> also seemed to be a misunderstanding in [1]): The component which serves
> “jdbc:” URLs (basically translating JDBC interfaces to OOo's API), uses
> this setting to determine the Java class to load. For all other URI
> schemes, and thus all other external database types, the attribute is
> completely useless. Thus, it probably should have been in a
> <driver-settings> or <connection-data> tag, or something like this ....

Unfortunately in the draft there is mention of the java classpath (it was not 
there in draft 5).

I'd like to also point out that there are many kinds of drivers with different 
APIs implemented in C, C++, Python, Ruby... and different sets of properties. 
If we wanted to include all of them, we'd get OOXML-like parts of ODF, 
designed to be usable for single vendor.

My proposal is still to remove db-java-classpath from the standard.
This element is implementation specific. Just like kde-driver or qt-driver - 
both (my examples) may have specific attributes - but we do not propose them 
for the standard.

On the other hand, there is also no mention of ODBC driver settings, so I 
cannot see symmetry with JDBC. If we claim ODBC can be added by the 
implementors of ODF as extension, I believe the same can be said for JDBC.

I am afraid otherwise there will be no single strong point against adding 
references to another implementation/vendor specific API like MS ADO drivers.

Long ago I have mentioned the issue here
http://www.kexi-project.org/wiki/wikiview/index.php%40OpenDocumentForDatabases.html

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
  Sponsored by OpenOffice Polska (http://www.openoffice.com.pl/en) to work on
  Kexi & KOffice (http://www.kexi.pl/en, http://www.koffice.org/kexi)
  KDE Libraries for MS Windows (http://windows.kde.org)