The world expresses itself in more than one language and the same is true in software, mostly to the general benefit; because diversity and progress are the results. Right? No one doubts that .NET took a lot of its direction from Java, and Java built on C++. Now there may be a bit of pollination of Java originating from the .NET side. Or maybe not.

There is nothing absolutely new in software, true. But Microsoft’s upcoming LINQ extension to .NET is a different take on an old quest.. LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query. It is an interesting attempt to ease relational data access for developers, whose real job is to program in C# or VB, but who spend big parts of many days in the wacky world of SQL. Some somewhat similar time saver may be coming to Java, although the connection to Microsoft LINQ may be a strain.

Late this summer IBM developerWorks published a technical article about an Eclipse IDE plug-in for writing Java database applications using a specialized syntax and a bit of auto-generation. Up until some point this work was known as ‘JLINQ’ but the name now is ‘pureQuery.’ We’ll let IBM’s Azadeh Ahadian, contributor and a member of the JLINQ design time team, tell you about the pureQuery architecture.

The design provides the means for the developer to specify a database connection (using for example DB2), thus enabling the Eclipse Java project to be aware of the underlying database artifacts (such as tables, stored procedures, and so on). Once the connection and the auto discovery of all database artifacts are completed, users can intuitively, through the GUI , transform any one of the underlying relational table entities into a Java object.

This is accomplished through auto generation of the relevant SQL statements and auto creation of the parent Java objects that encapsulate those statements. The generated Java objects and the contained SQL statements can be further customized in a natural Eclipse IDE programming environment with full integrated SQL and Java editing capabilities.

What about the name change? Who knows? In fact, as DataDirections’ Jesse Davis points out on his blo,g JLINQ is nothing of the sort that is LINQ. As described by Jesse, JLINQ, er, pureQuery, is a new ORM style code generator for Eclipse. You install JLINQ and tell your app what JDBC driver to use. It connects to the DB and an Eclipse project becomes ‘DB Aware.’ Check it out and see what you think.

Whatever you call it, it is a fairly significant development, Jesse told us on a recent call.

‘’The typical thing, with, for example, Hibernate, is you write your code and your SQL statements would be regular Java strings. And at design time you would be unaware of whether the SQL statement is correct or not. What is neat about this is, at design time, before you even run the code, SQL statements are checked for correctness, rather than having to wait until they run,'’ DataDirect data adept Davis said. - Jack Vaughan

Related
pureQuery: IBM’s new paradigm for writing Java database applications – IBM developerWorks
JLINQ really isn’t - JDBC Connections

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 10:28 am and is filed under Interoperability, Data issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.