Letters to BYTE.com

By BYTE.com Readers

March 1, 2004

(Letters to BYTE.com :  Page 1 of 1 )

Future Tech

Dear BYTE.com,

I very much enjoyed reading "Reykjavik: Fiber to Every Home" [by Hjalmar Gislason, BYTE.com, February 23, 2004]. The main reason I subscribe to BYTE is so that I can tap into your knowledge of what's just over the horizon.

Takes me back to the articles I used to read in your print mag...

Jack Hughes
http://www.openxtra.com/

Back to the Good Old Days

Dan Shusman does a good job summarizing the difficulties of mapping an OO application to a relational database [Oscillating Between Objects and Relational: The Impedance Mismatch, BYTE.com, February 16, 2004]. I've been there, and I remember the pain.

Our current application (for fund management: trades, accounting, balancing, reporting, etc) is written in IBM's VisualAge Smalltalk and uses GemStone/S, an active Smalltalk OO database, for persistence.

We find that not needing to decompose our objects into a database to be a huge productivity win. We also benefit from 100 percent application code portability: a method can be executed on either the server or the client, as required (our server code is exactly the same as our client code). In fact, we build small in-memory models for initial code development and for SUnit testing.

Our choice was made easier by not requiring a data link to some other RDB. Links to other applications (like commercial data sources and legacy systems) are done with FTP, NetDDE, file I/O, custom socket interface and, soon, web services. In other words, we find that interfacing at the application layer much easier than at the data layer.

I wonder what Dan's opinion is of active OO databases and how well he thinks they'd work in an enterprise setting. We, incidentally, are very happy with our technology choice.

Bob Nemec, Northwater Objects
BYTE.com > Letters to BYTE.com > 2004