Re: Re: Perl and Java

After having read through two of these long discussion threads -- and very interesting they are! -- I find that there is one aspect of the comparison that has hardly been touched on at all: the database interface capabilities of the two systems. Java can use only interact with JDBC, as far as I can gather, whereas Perl can interact with Sybase, Oracle, mySQL/SQL, and one or two other database systems, correct? Wouldn't that make Perl much more useful than Java?

laura.guimauve

Comment on Re: Re: Perl and Java

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Re: Re: Re: Perl and Java by lachoy (Parson) on May 06, 2001 at 18:48 UTC
You're misunderstanding -- JDBC is (more or less) equivalent to the DBI in Perl. Both are middle layers which allow driver authors to write to a spec and application developers to write to the layer without worrying about the driver being used. There are caveats to that, of course :-) But if you're using general database capabilities both work quite well. Having used both, DBI is faster but JDBC has more metadata capabilities and is generally more featureful. It's also more difficult to use (like most things in Java) because you have to always be aware of datatypes, which Perl and DBI (and well-written drivers) make transparent for you. In addition, most (if not all) of the big databases have Type-4 (pure Java) drivers for JDBC. This means that you don't have to worry about client libraries, compiling, etc. across different platforms -- the same Type-4 Oracle JDBC driver will work on both Linux and Win32 with no modifications whatsoever. Very nice. Chris M-x auto-bs-mode	[reply]

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Re: Re: Re: Perl and Java
by lachoy (Parson) on May 06, 2001 at 18:48 UTC

You're misunderstanding -- JDBC is (more or less) equivalent to the DBI in Perl. Both are middle layers which allow driver authors to write to a spec and application developers to write to the layer without worrying about the driver being used. There are caveats to that, of course :-) But if you're using general database capabilities both work quite well.

Having used both, DBI is faster but JDBC has more metadata capabilities and is generally more featureful. It's also more difficult to use (like most things in Java) because you have to always be aware of datatypes, which Perl and DBI (and well-written drivers) make transparent for you.

In addition, most (if not all) of the big databases have Type-4 (pure Java) drivers for JDBC. This means that you don't have to worry about client libraries, compiling, etc. across different platforms -- the same Type-4 Oracle JDBC driver will work on both Linux and Win32 with no modifications whatsoever. Very nice.

Chris
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