Yep, Jackcess is pure Java. It will work on any Java Virtual Machine (1.4+).

Jackcess currently supports only Access 2000 databases. Access 2003 is not supported.

We want to give a lot of credit to mdbtools. They have been around much longer than Jackcess, and, along with POI, inspired us that a project like this could be done. mdbtools is written in C. There is a Java port of it, but if you've ever read or used a Java port of a C library, you can appreciate the difference between such a library and one written from scratch in Java.

At the time of this writing, mdbtools could only read Access databases. Jackcess can also write to them. According to their web site, "Write support is currently being worked on and the first cut is expected to be included in the 0.6 release." This status hasn't changed since we first started work on Jackcess.

mdbtools supports Access 97 databases, which Jackcess does not. The Java port of mdbtools also includes an implementation of a small subset of the JDBC APIs. Jackcess does not currently, but a pure Java JDBC driver for Access could certainly be written on top of Jackcess.

POI is released under The Apache License. Jackcess is released under The GNU Lesser General Public License. The Apache license allows closed-source and/or commercial forks. The LGPL does not. If you change or enhance Jackcess, you must contribute your changes back to the project.

• Portability - With Jackcess, your app has one less dependency on Windows.
• Speed - We had an app that used the ODBC bridge to write data to an Access database. When we switched it over to use Jackcess, it was 5 times faster.
• Stability - With large amounts of data, we found the ODBC brige to be pretty unreliable.
• Simplicity - With Jackcess, there is no ODBC configuration to set up.

Version 1.0 requires JDK 1.4 or higher. The version in CVS HEAD and future releases will require JDK 1.5 or higher.

Probably because you're missing a jar that Jackcess depends on from your classpath. Take a loook at the dependencies list. The first 3 are required for both building and running and can be found either at the Jakarta Commons or the Ibiblio Maven Repository. The other 3 are only required for building, in which case, Maven will find them for you.

HMS is a small company located in suburban Philadelphia. Using proprietary matching and consolidation software, HMS scientifically manufactures the most comprehensive and accurate healthcare data sets in the market today. We're hiring! HMS is always looking for talented individuals, especially Java developers.

Ok, that wasn't a question, but we'll try to respond anyway. :) Jackcess is young, and not that robust yet. As you might imagine, it's kind of hard to test, simply by its nature. There are bugs that we are aware of, and certainly many more that we are not. If you find what looks like a bug, please report it. Even better, fix it, and submit a patch.