Re: Clean Object Class Design -- What is it?

Bob Badour wrote:
> In short, when oodbms products have matured to the point where they do
> have such a formal mechanism, I expect you will find they are rdbms
> products.

Hi Bob,

I drink a beer on you for this statement. ...especially for "In short". :-)

(I know it's very likely, you will punish me with your reply.)

Inspired by this very long thread (and some of your trolling replies which lead me to believe that there is a machine on the other side) I have started a discussion with some friends, whether inheritance really is the wisest principle for programming languages. We have come up with a delegation concept which is right now being discussed in the German Java newsgroup. Delegation removes the need for inheritance and allows a much more open, flexible and modifiable hierarchy. The concept is quite close to relations.

There is more truth in your points than I have previously admitted.

Enough theory and back to current real-world products: A very tight binding to programming languages can make products superior for certain usecases, since mechanisms need less overhead. This *is* the domain of todays object databases although it has little to do with the underlying storage system. A tight language binding could very well also be part of a relational database. You called it "middleware" in a thread some time ago, but the more a vendor implements himself, the more efficient a system is bound to be.

Some 200 postings ago I mentioned that relational databases and object databases will converge. Your posting suggests that you see a chance also. Back to my beer:
Cheers!

Kind regards,
Carl

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Carl Rosenberger
db4o - database for objects - http://www.db4o.com