At 03:26 AM 14/03/2007, you wrote:

>I am developing a Java application. This application is intended to
>run on Linux, Mac and Windows platforms. Are there any platform-
>indepentent libraries/binaries for FireBird ?

No. The Firebird modules are C++ executables that are compiled for a
specific hardware/OS environment. Text-based files needed by the
server are fairly generic but even those have variants according to
filesystem, due to different ways of expressing newline.

Then, you have databases. A database is in a file which, internally,
has its own on-disk structure. However, that internal structure is
hardware-dependent, due to differences in the ways CPUs store numbers
(Big Endian vs Little Endian). (Even a Java VM has to address this issue).

Theoretically you can file-copy a database from one Intel platform to
another...practically, it's not a superb idea. The gbak utility
allows you to create a transportable backup on the source platform
that you can copy to the destination platform and recontsitute as a
database using gbak on the target platform. To deploy, you would
typically ship a transportable backup (conventionally, with a ".fbk"
extension).

>Or do I ( if I choose to go for Firebird) have to have separate
>binary files for each platform I want FireBird to run on ?

Depends what binary files you are referring to. On the server side,
everything is platform/hardware dependent. On the client side, the
Jaybird Java driver for Firebird takes care of the entire client
component of the Firebird universe. It will connect to a *server* on
any platform.

Subscribe to the firebird-java list to ask any Java-specific
questions regarding your client application development and its Java interface.

./heLen