Hi,

> I'm going to put an item in the FAQ on using java.util.Properties
> when getting a connection, as in Richard Drent's example below.

This is standard way of obtaining connections through DriverManager.

> Has this always been supported in the driver, or at least since 1.0?

Yes, this is standard JDBC contract when developing drivers:

public interface Driver {
....
Connection connect(String url, Properties props);
}

> Any gotcha's I should mention?

Not that I know. By the way, JayBird 1.5 supports also "charSet"
property, where you can specify Java character encoding ("Cp1251"
instead of "WIN1251").

Roman