Java developers may be familiar with [url=http://maven.apache.org]Maven[/url], the dependency management and project lifecycle mananagement tool. It's really good at managing a structured project and best of all it automatically downloads and adds to the Java classpath any declared dependencies.

These dependency JARs are stored in Maven repositories and by default Maven only looks in the so-called "Central" repository, at [url=http://repo1.maven.org/maven2]repo1.maven.org/maven2[/url].

For a while I have been trying to get the Ingres JDBC driver into this central repository and this morning I found out that our request has been successful! This makes it really easy for Java developers to integrate the Ingres JDBC driver into their Maven-controlled projects.

Each Maven project has a project object model, or POM file, pom.xml (See [url=http://maven.apache.org/pom.html]Maven - POM Reference[/url] for details). This has a <dependencies> section into which dependencies for the project can be declared.

In order to add the Ingres JDBC driver as a dependency, add the following inside the <dependencies> tag:
[code]<dependency>
<groupId>com.ingres.jdbc</groupId>
<artifactId>iijdbc</artifactId>
</dependency>[/code]

And that's it! That will include the latest JDBC driver in your project.

If you want to specify a particular version to use, you need the Database version and the JDBC driver version. The following are currently held in the central Maven repository:
[code]
Ingres Version | JDBC Driver Version | Maven Version
Ingres 2006 Rls 2 | 3.2.4 | 9.1-3.4.2
9.2 | 3.4.7 | 9.2-3.4.7
9.2 | 3.4.8 | 9.2-3.4.8[/code]

The default version is currently 9.2-3.4.8.

It would be great to hear about your experiences with this. Obviously you will need an Ingres database to connect to, so head over to [url]esd.ingres.com[/url] to download that too!

Thanks to Teresa, Grant, Phil and the Maven guys for making this happen!