John,

> Forgive my lack of understanding here, but by server are you simply meaning
> the database server and not some middleware element associated with the
> Type 3 driver? If so, then there's no problem, as the database itself will
> only be running on Windows, Linux or OS X - it just needs to be accessible
> my older Macs.

There are 2 elements to the server. Firebird itself and Interserver.
Both need to be on the same machine and it cannot be a Mac OS 9.

Your java application and interclient (pure java element of the driver)
run on the Mac. You app talks to interclient as the jdbc driver.
Interclient talks over the wire to Interserver running on your database
server machine and interserver talks to Firebird on the same database
server machine.

If you use Jaybird in your client app then Jaybird talks directly to
Firebird over port 3050, when you use Interclient it talks to
Interserver on port 3060 and then interserver talks to firebird on 3050.

Hope that clarifies things and confirms that all being well you should
be able to do what you want.

However, if you app has a long life on mac OS 9 then my preference you
still be to put the work into getting Jaybird to work as Interclient
will have no support. If you look at the ojb project
(http://db.apache.org/ojb) you will see that they have some conditionals
and a parser that changes the code during the build so that it can be
different for different versions of java.

Regards

Dave
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