Oracle Corp chose last week’s JavaOne conference to launch the JSQL Java language extension it had worked on with IBM Corp and Tandem Computers Inc. Sun Microsystems Inc gave its blessing and will attempt to push it through the ISO/IEC process once it gains its Publicly Available Specification, PAS, submitter stripes in the summer, according to Oracle’s director of server technologies marketing, Steve Levine. JSQL enhances Java DataBase Connectivity, JDBC, by adding a kind of Java intelligence, in that developers can write Java code so that database users don’t just get a pointer back from a database query. They’ll be able to generate Java types to go with the SQL query so that it can do compile-time checking to know whether the query was even valid in the first place, for instance. Previously, according to Levine, the only way to do this in Java was to use embedded SQL. Tandem has done a lot of work on this, which accounts for its somewhat unusual inclusion among such Java mavens. The draft JSQL specification is available at http://www.splash. javasoft.com/databases, and the submission won’t be available until the summer at the earliest.
