On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 12:40 PM, Levente Uzonyi <leves@elte.hu> wrote:

On Fri, 4 Mar 2011, Mariano Martinez Peck wrote:

We are really happy to announce that ESUG will sponsor us once again

...

through the ESUG Summer Talk project. This means that we have reached the ESUG expectations and that they still think that relational database access is an important matter in Smalltalk.

snip

5) Cog compatibility.

...

What has to be done?

Indeed, nothing. We were not sure if FFI was working on it, but it turns out that it was. The idea is to be aware if Eliot releases a threaded VM/FFI so that we do not lock the VM (even if we have our micro-lock strategy when possible)

...

6) Use Alien instead of FFI. Eliot is working on a threaded CogVM. One of the projects of the GSoC of this year was to make something similar to a threaded FFI. What the student did is a modification in Alien (I think) that can be run in a multithreaded envirorment. He worked with Eliot. The idea is when Eliot releases the threaded CogVM, this FFI would work our of the box, and would avoid locking the WHOLE vm while a C function is being invoked (as it happens today with FFI).....So....when that VM is released, we MUST migrate to that).

How is Alien better than FFI?

We do not know. However, we will not spend time in Alien unless it is working out of the box and integrated in all standard VMs.

AFAIK Alien itself is not developed anymore, parts of it will be merged with FFI.

Ahh ok, we didn't know. Thnkas.

Levente

P.S.: http://www.squeaksource.com/SqueakDBX.html states that code in the repository has MIT license, but it includes Glorp which has LGPL(S) license.

Yes, the problem is that SqueakDBX as itself (the database driver), is MIT. Thus, the repository is MIT. Glorp is LGPL. When we started (years after SqueakDBX) with GlorpDBX, we found it easier to commit our changes to SqueakDBX repo instead of the Glorp one (because not everybody may agree with our changes). The good news is that Alan Night was considering making Glorp MIT. I cc'ed him to see if there are news. Cheers Mariano