# History and Roadmap Change Log Roadmap History of this Database Engine Why Java Supporters ## Change Log The up-to-date change log is available at http://www.h2database.com/html/changelog.html ## Roadmap The current roadmap is available at http://www.h2database.com/html/roadmap.html ## History of this Database Engine The development of H2 was started in May 2004, but it was first published on December 14th 2005. The main author of H2, Thomas Mueller, is also the original developer of Hypersonic SQL. In 2001, he joined PointBase Inc. where he wrote PointBase Micro, a commercial Java SQL database. At that point, he had to discontinue Hypersonic SQL. The HSQLDB Group was formed to continued to work on the Hypersonic SQL codebase. The name H2 stands for Hypersonic 2, however H2 does not share code with Hypersonic SQL or HSQLDB. H2 is built from scratch. ## Why Java The main reasons to use a Java database are: Very simple to integrate in Java applications Support for many different platforms More secure than native applications (no buffer overflows) User defined functions (or triggers) run very fast Unicode support Some think Java is too slow for low level operations, but this is no longer true. Garbage collection for example is now faster than manual memory management. Developing Java code is faster than developing C or C++ code. When using Java, most time can be spent on improving the algorithms instead of porting the code to different platforms or doing memory management. Features such as Unicode and network libraries are already built-in. In Java, writing secure code is easier because buffer overflows can not occur. Features such as reflection can be used for randomized testing. Java is future proof: a lot of companies support Java. Java is now open source. To increase the portability and ease of use, this software depends on very few libraries. Features that are not available in open source Java implementations (such as Swing) are not used, or only used for optional features. ## Supporters Many thanks for those who reported bugs, gave valuable feedback, spread the word, and translated this project. Also many thanks to the donors: Code Lutin, France Code 42 Software, Inc., Minneapolis NetSuxxess GmbH, Germany Poker Copilot, Steve McLeod, Germany SkyCash, Poland Lumber-mill, Inc., Japan Martin Wildam, Austria Donald Bleyl, USA Frank Berger, Germany Ashwin Jayaprakash, USA Florent Ramiere, France Jun Iyama, Japan Antonio Casqueiro, Portugal Oliver Computing LLC, USA Harpal Grover Consulting Inc., USA Elisabetta Berlini, Italy William Gilbert, USA Antonio Dieguez Rojas, Chile Ontology Works, USA Pete Haidinyak, USA William Osmond, USA Joachim Ansorg, Germany Oliver Soerensen, Germany Christos Vasilakis, Greece Fyodor Kupolov, Denmark Jakob Jenkov, Denmark Stéphane Chartrand, Switzerland Glenn Kidd, USA Gustav Trede, Sweden Joonas Pulakka, Finland Bjorn Darri Sigurdsson, Iceland Iyama Jun, Japan Gray Watson, USA Erik Dick, Germany Pengxiang Shao, China Bilingual Marketing Group, USA Philippe Marschall, Switzerland Knut Staring, Norway