Derby and Eclipse

Apache Derby is an open-source relational database project that begun as a company named Cloudscape. The company was later acquired by Informix Software which was eventually acquired by IBM. While IBM continues to provide and support Cloudscape as a commercial product, the company also decided to donate it to the open-source community. The open-source project adopted the name of Derby. Derby is a DBMS product entirely written in Java. It supports the SQL standard and much of the functionality found in commercially available DBMS products. One of its unique characteristics is that Derby achieves this while being implemented entirely in Java and the size of the database engine and JDBC driver is approximately 2 megabytes!! You can learn more about the Apache Derby project and download it for free from its home page at: http://db.apache.org/derby/

Eclipse is a platform independent software framework -- it's much more than an IDE, in fact it is a framework used to develop IDE's. The Java Development Kit and compiler that comes with Eclipse was in fact developed using Eclipse. Commonly Eclipse is used for Java development, although due to its flexibility Eclipse has been extended to enable it for development in other programming languages such as C, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc. Eclipse started as a project in IBM which again IBM decided to donate to the open-source community and it is now maintained by the Eclipse Foundation. In a short time it has now become one of the most popular development environments for Java development and has been adopted for use by several technology companies. You can read more about Eclipse in WikiPedia's entry at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_(software). You can learn more about Eclipse and download it by going to its home page at http://www.eclipse.org/

Eclipse + Derby Installation

A plugin has been written for Eclipse that extends it to integrate the Apache Derby database. Following are the steps that you need to take to create this combination:

  1. Download and install Eclipse from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/. As of this writing, the most recent version is Eclipse 3.2. The installation is fairly easy for all operating systems supported as it is just a matter of un-archiving the downloaded package and placing it in a desired location on the file system. If you use MS Windows, I will assume that Eclipse is installed in the directory C:\Eclipse3.2, however you can install it anywhere you like.
  2. When you run Eclipse, you will be asked to specify the Workspace where Eclipse will store and find the project you build. This can be anywhere and once you pick a location, you can check the box that will fix the location and thus prevent Eclipse from asking where the Workspace is located everytime you start it.
  3. There are two ways to extend Eclipse with Derby functionality. The first is to allow Eclipse to do it automatically or to do it manually.
    1. To install the Derby plugins manually, you will need to download the Apache Derby Eclipse Plugins from this website: http://db.apache.org/derby/derby_downloads.html. Once on that page, click the link for the latest official release -- 10.2.2.0 as of the writing of this document. On the page for the latest official release, you will find links to the two Eclipse plugins necessary to extend Eclipse with the Derby database. The plugins are named derby_core_plugin and derby_ui_plugin. Download both of these plugins (they are zip-compressed archives). Unzip each archive into the Eclipse home directory -- i.e. the directory where Eclipse is installed, say C:\Eclipse3.2. NOTE: If done correctly, then the C:\Eclipse3.2\plugins directory will now contain these three directories: org.apache.derby.core_10.2.2, org.apache.derby.ui_1.1.0, and org.apache.derby.plugin.doc_1.1.0.
    2. While I include the instructions for using Eclipse's software update to install Derby, you should know that I've not been successful at installing it this way, so I really recommend the manual install!! Here are the instructions... Start Eclipse and use the Help menu to reach the Software Updates option and then the submenu option Find and Install. You will then be prompted on what features to install, check the Search for new features to install option and clik Next. Now, select the Callisto Discovery Site and click Finish. Expand the features to install and then expand the Enabling Features and check the feature Apache Derby Core Feature 10.2.2.0. Click Next and if you accept the terms in the license agreement and click Next, you will be shown the feature to be installed and the location where it will be installed. Click Finish to do the installation. You may get a warning regarding installation of an unsigned feature, click Install All to perform the installation. Finally, allow the restart of the Eclipse workbench for the installation to take effect.

Database Resources