commons-dbutils is a JDBC utility library that has been around since 2003. A number of projects use it to ensure that JDBC connections are properly closed. The main goals of the project are:
- Small: You should be able to understand the whole package in a short amount of time.
- Transparent: DbUtils doesn't do any magic behind the scenes. You give it a query, it executes it and cleans up for you.
- Fast: You don't need to create a million temporary objects to work with DbUtils.
A natural question is to ask is, "Why fork commons-dbutils, why not just contribute?" The answer is that I initially did contribute to dbutils, but have since stopped because of how hard it is to release new versions of commons-dbutils. Long story short, I gave up. However, I had already written version 2 of dbutils and wanted to make sure it saw the light of day. So instead of trying work through commons-dbutils and all its problems I simply decided to fork the project and "start over" with sop4j-dbutils.
The biggest feature that sop4j-dbutils (or dbutilsv2) brings to the table is a fluent API with named parameter support. Other than that, a few bug fixes have been merged into the code and hopfully by hosting on GitHub anyone can make a pull request with a patch and/or file a bug.
Helping is easy, just clone the repo, make your changes, and file a pull request. If you don't feel comfortable making changes directly -- and you should-- you can also file a bug/issue.
If you like what you see here please check out the SOP4J blog.