Why did SQLJ die?

Question

Does anyone know why that was canned a long time ago? Seemed like it wasn't such a bad idea. My very naive guess is that ORM tools didn't need SQLJ and also plugged the gap. Anyway, still curious.

Harness

Answer 1

This isn't an authoritative answer, but I can see these reasons:

• In the early 2000's, powerful IDEs (Eclipse, Netbeans, JBuilder) made their way into the Java ecosystem. SQLJ doesn't work well with IDEs
• In the mid 2000's, everyone thought SQL itself was dead as ORMs started to hide SQL away
• Today, there are more typesafe alternatives like jOOQ (or LINQ in .NET. Disclaimer: I work for the company behind jOOQ).

Besides, there are two major flaws to SQLJ:

• SQLJ simplified embedding SQL, but never brought any additional compile-time safety, such as type checks and syntax checks.
• SQLJ is good for static SQL, but dynamic SQL (with dynamic predicate or table source composition) cannot be achieved easily.

Packaging