This is just a very short note about the recent license change from LGPL to GPL made by the author of extJS. When choosing an open source product make sure that the contributors are fragmented across enough organizations to prevent any chance of being able to do a license change. If that is not the case make sure that the community is large enough so that you have a good chance at succeeding with a fork if the need arises. In the case of extJS the later seems to be the case. As such the license change itself is not soooo big an issue, since a lot of people do not consider their frontend code to be proprietary anyways. The source is there for all to see. So for the most part people are fine considering their frontend to be licensed under the GPL. That being said, extJS guys are trying to make people believe that using extJS on the frontend has any effect on the backend licensing. Kinda reminds me of the MySQL client license stunt and the days when MySQL sales reps intentionally confused people about the GPL .. good that those days are over.

I spotted an interesting blog post over on Planet OSDB about prepared statements gotchas. It illustrates very well the issue that prepared statements have been plagued with since their inception: namely that they can severely hurt performance (even though they are considered to improve performance by most people).

So it seems that Sun has made it clear that the core product will remain open source. Of course the definition of what is core and what isn't is up to Sun/MySQL to decide, but it seems that overall more things will be released as open source than if MySQL would have gone through with its planned IPO. So this is a good thing. Speaking of non core products, I really like what Mike and his team are doing in the GUI department with the workbench and their other GUI tools. However since Sun is friendly to PostgreSQL and actually also distributes SQLite (its bundled with Solaris after all), I wonder if they are considering making their tools more and more portable across other RDBMS?

As I already noted on the Liip blog, there will be a TestFest as part of the Webtuesday Hackday. So in order to better prepare things for the event I would appreciate it if people interested in joining the TestFest drop me a note via email or in a comment. See you there!

In a little app where users can create tabs and portlets in those tabs I ran into some issues with my ordered list implementation. It turns out I just misplaced a filtering expression in the WHERE clause instead of the JOIN condition. The basic idea was that I wanted to add new portlets in the left hand column at the top. The positions from the portlets actually start at 0, but what I am doing is to insert them at 1 below the current minimum or -1 if the table is empty. Then in a second query I push everything up by one. Seemed like the most efficient way to deal with concurrency. I guess in theory I could even skip pushing things up by one, but oh well.