On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 12:44 AM, Alain rastoul <Alr.dev@free.fr> wrote:
Nice vision. I want it now :) I think smalltalk is the best choice for that - you know better than me of course However to make a living with it, it has to interface with other IT systems and standards, so that developers can make an sell a part of the system. Pharo has seaside-web on one end but may be something is missing with relational databases. They are today the heart of business information systems (I have to try dbx and glorp ,
This is why ESUG has sponsored several times DBX. There are a couple of other alternatives to DBX. There is a native (written in squeak/pharo) driver for PostgreSQL and MySQL. In addition, there are another wrappers (delegating to C via FFI) to Sqlite and ODBC. And frameworks on top you have a couple...Glorp, SandstonDB, SqueakSave, ROE, etc... Here are a list: http://www.seaside.st/documentation/persistence odbc is not usable because of locks)
This is the biggest problem. With dbx we "more or less" fix it. Basically, most of the database client libraries can work asynchronous. OpenDBX also. So....from the image side, we invoke a function of OpenDBX, and OpenDBX answer us whether it is ready or not. Then, if it is not ready, we do a little wait in the image so that to let the process to another guy. And then we retry....until it is finished. It is not the best, but at least it doesn't lock the whole VM for a long time. DBXTalk has been used in several production apps and we didn't have a problem so far with this. Anyway, Cog now is almost to support multithreaded FFI, where there is no lock :)
Side note, I often wondered myself why object databases didn't catch? Technical issues? Marketing?ç
For me Marketing, just as Smalltalk (in addition to prices).
Btw, pharo has taken a good direction. Nice work. I'll try and see if I can help in this field (databases) which is one of my skill
You can help with DBXTalk team is you wish ;)
Cheers Alain
-- Alain_rastoul
-- Mariano http://marianopeck.wordpress.com