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

"David Cressey" <david_at_dcressey.com> wrote ...
> I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "embedding our database into
> applications". The only way I can interpret it is to mean PRECISELY what
> the inventors of database systems in the 1970s were trying to get away
 from:
> the idea that all the data definitions were buried somewhere in source
 code,
> and the only way to manage data definitions was to get involved in the
> details of source code maintenance.

I'm not Carl, and I don't know what he meant by "embed"... but I am interested in the ways you would value one or the other of the following:

1. Run a relational database and have multiple applications access it.
2. Run some kind of database (doesn't really matter what kind, so long as you can manage to store objects in it somehow), and write an object oriented class library to control access to it. Put the object-oriented class library on a server running some middleware communication protocol and access it through COM, CORBA, RMI, etc.

I find that a very large part of software development these days is done in the second model. In that model, you choose a database based on the features it provides for performance and the ease of creating a data model to represent an existing data model expressed as a system of classes. If an OODB can do that, then it can do that.

Furthermore, it's simple to make a transition, in the second case, from using a database privately within one application, toward storing the data centrally for several applications. All that needs to happen is for the data access classes to be relocated to a different, remote server.

Chris Smith Received on Sun Jul 22 2001 - 01:33:51 CEST