Aargh, for the umpteeth time I run into a compilation error in Rational. The setup is pretty simple: Java utility project included as a Utility project in an EAR and referenced in the MANIFEST.MF file of another project.
Evertime I startup this workspace Rational mentions that it cannot find the classes in this utility project, so I remove the utility project from the EAR (this also removes it from the MANIFEST.MF) and re-add it (don't forget to add it to the MANIFEST.MF as well). And presto, no compilation errors.
Java development used to be rather straightforward, but with bugs in the tools like this I long for some PDP-11 assembly hacking in vi...

Rational & Databases

I keep running into minor usability issues with major rammifications when using Rational/Eclipse tools. You might say: download the Eclipse source and fix it, but alas, I'm using Rational which is based on Eclipse (and thus inherits it's bugs) but costs a lot of money instead. So it's not really open-source..

Anyway, the issue at hand: how to add a new JDBC driver (in this case Derby 10.5) and share it with my coworkers.. Well, for normal dependencies, the easiest would be to create a 'resources' project, put the JAR in there and share it. Not so when adding a new JDBC driver: the only option is to select a file from the filesystem. This ofcourse assumes that every machine and filesystem is identical which in practise is never the case.
So I though, okay lets edit the datasource definition directly (in your workspace under .metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity) and change the location to include a variable (for example ${workspace_loc}. But unfortunately the variable expansions doesn't work here either.

So I'm a bit stuck. Adding the driver to a repository project is easy. Creating a new JDBC driver definition is easy. But sharing this with other people...