Igor Polevoy

Hi, I’m Mike with Yugotastic, sitting here with Igor Polivoy. Igor does a lot of free and open source development on the Java platform. He’s created tools underneath the Java Lite family of, well, tools, frameworks, one being Active Web, Active JDBC, JSpec, and the, what was it, the HTTP Lite? HTTP Lite, basically it’s a very small client to access HTTP services. So you kind of have this family, this framework, this stack of tools that you’ve built. What kind of led to you creating those? Well, a kind of envy, I think. For the time being, I was a typical Java guy, you know, not paying attention to what’s happening outside Java. In the meantime, the Ruby on Rails revolution took off. And back in 2007, I was in the project. It was a Java project, but then Rails was slowly introduced into the project and I picked up Ruby on Rails, Ruby as a language, and then Ruby on Rails, and I saw that developing with Ruby on Rails was so much faster and better than developing anything that we had in Java. And it was like, okay, Ruby developers enjoy this fantastic framework, why don’t we have it in Java? Okay, so you were just like, how can I make something that’s as quick to develop with? And that’s where Active Web came from. No, that was not my immediate…my immediate reaction to this was, great, somebody must be developing right now. Oh, okay. Yeah, you wanted to see what was out there. And I waited a couple years from 2007 to 2009, but nothing like that came out. So I rolled up my sleeves and started developing first Active JDBC. Okay, so you started with the database first. Yeah. And was that something that you mostly used for your own projects? Or… Oh, no, no, no. This was from the very beginning, it was used on commercial projects. We were building a massive system for an insurance company, and we had two and a half months to start and finish a massive project. So if we didn’t have an agile tool, if we even went with something like Hibernate, at the time I was managing a relatively small team, it was a team of four people plus myself. And with Active JDBC… But by the time we started the project, Active JDBC was already working, not all features were there. Was it 80% or was it…? Well, it was probably 80% of what we needed for that one project. Okay. So you had to implement the rest kind of on time. Yes. And it was really funny because, you know, as a developer or architect, sometimes you architect things right, and sometimes you architect things the wrong way. Right. This one was architected right, because when we hit… When we hit the necessity of having many-to-many relationship, we didn’t have it in Active JDBC. And my guys were like, “Okay, back to Hibernate,” and I’m like, “Wait, we’re gonna have it two days from now.” Yeah. And we had it two days from now. From then. So it was kind of battle-tested from the word go. Oh, yeah. You had the idea, and then you immediately put it into production. And by the way, the first implementation was for a crazy schema in Oracle. So right there, we hit so many problems. So is Active JDBC Oracle-specific, or is it…? No, no, no. It’s not Oracle-specific. The next implementation was for MySQL, and then basically, there’s not much difference between different databases, other than generating very specific queries for specific things, like pagination and… So how did you go about implementing all these adapters? Oh, basically, I implemented Oracle, MySQL, and Postgre, and H2, and two dialects for… Microsoft SQL Server were donated by the community. Okay. So this was… You had already released it, and it was out in the wild. And by the way, what license is… Apache. Apache. Apache. Okay. So how were you sharing… How did people outside of your community get to find out about…? Well, I didn’t really do too much effort, or any effort to publicize it. I basically threw it out into a Google code, and that’s it. Okay. I’m assuming that most people who find these projects are people who have had experience in Ruby on Rails, and then start Googling, like, Active Record for Java, or things like that. Okay. So that similar wording is a little bit intentional, because you want people to be able to make that… Yeah. You mean ActiveJSBC? Yeah. I was thinking what to name this thing. Yeah. I didn’t particularly want to name it a funny, nonexistent name. Right. I thought that ActiveRecord is a good name. It’s also a name of a pattern. So I took the word “active,” because actually, as opposed to passive objects in Hibernate, it’s a lot more active. And then I thought, on the flip side, it’s a very thin veneer on top of JDBC. Okay. So ActiveJDBC, and then came about. So you started with ActiveJDBC. How did you come up with ActiveWeb? What was the impetus for that? Well, as soon as we implemented a massive back-end system for that company, we also had to implement about four portals. And to be honest, implementing ActiveJDBC was a lot harder. And I always thought that ActiveWeb would be something like that. Yeah. And it turned out to be very easy to do. I also implemented a number of other frameworks before then… Mm-hmm. …to make it easier for people to build web applications. So I did have experience doing that. Okay. Although they didn’t go anywhere. So a little bit about why did you choose to make these open-source tools? Why didn’t you try to bundle them up and sell these tools as components? Oh. Well, number one reason, I’m not a salesman. But the reality is I used so much from open-source community. Mm-hmm. 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