> Is there hope for Jaybird to co-exist with other similar technologies
> in the future? or is Firebird enthusiasts a dying breed?
>
> Enlighten me.

Definitely not dying and not only enthusiasts - our developers are on our
payroll. Unfortunately we do not have too much money like Eclipse
Foundation members, so we have to carefully select our priorities.

If you check the split between programming languages used to access
Firebird, Java will have something about 6-8%, most will be Delphi and/or
.NET. This also defines the strategy for the Java part of the project,
which is definitely not to support every possible platform and is
definitely not to compete with Java RDBMSes.

Yes, we try our best to support major technologies. So far, in the O/R
world the Hibernate was the target. The Eclipse DTP support was not a high
prio, simply because there was no real demand here. The GUI part of DTP (I
work with 1.6.2) is still not a replacement for a normal DB GUI (look, even
freeware DB Visualiser does much more than DTP). The JPA issues were not
known to me, since I work with Hibernate and he XML mapping files and
nobody cared to create a bug report in our tracker that JPA in Eclipse is
an issue.

But I have a question to you - did you hear about the Firebird Foundation
(http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php?op=ffoundation), which is the the
main money source for developers of the Firebird? And if not and you use
Firebird commercially and save money on server licensing, would you
consider to join the Foundation as a sponsor?

Roman