David,

> IMO most of the excessive complexity of the current driver comes from the
> shenanigans necessary to have xa support.
>
> Again IMO the principal selling point of firebird and this driver is that
> it is as far as I know the only free open source driver/db with xa support.

But these are precisely my points. Our code has to work with other free
dbms (we use postgresql and mysql as well as firebird). While xa support
is not available for them (nor available in several frameworks -
turbine, melati, jrf for example) then we need different coding
techniques to use xa when using firebird. That is

a) a pain foi programmers

b) a pain for dbms portability

> Rather than creating 2 or more java drivers I'd rather see the effort put
> into adding into firebird 2 the ability to do work on any transaction on
> any (physical) connection.

I don't think anyone is suggesting 2 drivers, merely trying to make the
packaging clearer as to where the various functionality is. That makes
the code much more approachable.

> Remember, among the goodies the jca support gives you essentially for free
> is a DataSource with built in connection pooling.

Only if you can use it within your application. Anyone who has been
developing applications for any length of time will already have
connection pooling. We cannot just drop 4 years of good solid code that
has been working totally reliably and is nicely maintainable to jump
onto jboss/jca.

David