Re: Loading Classes from Tables

Walden H. Leverich wrote:
>>Are you sure you want to do that?  
> No. I'm not "sure." But I think I do.

:)

>>You run the possibility of encountering compatibility problems 
>>at some point in the future if the JVM changes. 
> Why? No more so than for a .class file sitting in the IFS, no? Are you
> suggesting that there might be a change in the JVM where IBM looked at
> all the .class files in the IFS at upgrade time and changed them? Doubt
> it.

Assuming you used a good build tool (ant, eclipse, etc), then you can
have a reasonably safe assumption that all the classes sitting in the
IFS or in a jar file will be compatible with each other.

If you store the class in a blob, you have to be absolutely rock solid
sure that your change control procedures (including, but not limited to,
change control system [speaking as a vendor]) are in place.  If the
interface for the class you storing in the blob changes in the calling
code (which I assume is not loaded from a blob) then your application
will break horribly because it will no longer be compatible with the
class in the blob.

If you store just the data in your database, you can version it ... and
build the versioning functionality in your code ... so when the class
(not stored in a blob) loads the information from the database, it can
make the necessary adjustments to previous versions so they would be
compatible.

david