Finally, I managed to start with the development of SQL Data Expert. As a first step, to get into the project slowly, I created an object factory mechanism that should be flexible enough to be reused throughout the whole project. Next, I will build an interface for basic DBMS connectivity and implement it for PostgreSQL. Nothing fancy and no configurability via XML yet, but it should be ok for the first alpha release or two. Coming from the programming language Eiffel, I somewhat miss its powerful multiple inheritance support.