Re: Flamewar object databases vs. relational databases (was: Unknown SQL)

"akmal _at_ city" <akmal_at_soi.city.ac.uk.nospam> writes:

> I have seen Scott Ambler talk about this concept. He has been working with
> mapping ideas for a long time and his work is often referenced in the
> literature.

It's a weird thing indeed that many OO developers still write object-relational mapping code by hand. The idea of automatic mapping has been around for a long time.

The other poster mentioned Perl. Automatic O-R mapping is available in that language, see http://www.soundobjectlogic.com/tangram/ for full documentation; at
http://www.soundobjectlogic.com/tangram/presentation/ you can find the presentation I'll give at the upcoming Perl Conference in San Diego. We're currently working on a Java implementation.

Interestingly, Perl (and Smalltalk, CLOS and probably many other 'high-level' languages) make it possible to implement OO persistence in a transparent manner. See
e.g. http://www.soundobjectlogic.com/tangram/doc/ref/ and http://www.soundobjectlogic.com/tangram/presentation/img23.htm.

Thus client code can forget about the exact nature of the persistence medium in use, at least most of the time. In fact, we're also working on a XML backend for both the Perl and Java mappers.

-- 
Jean-Louis Leroy
Sound Object Logic
http://www.soundobjectlogic.com