On 16-04-2005 21:59, "Stefano Mazzocchi" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Leo Simons wrote:
>> On 16-04-2005 18:30, "Stefano Mazzocchi" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> 
>>> The more I think about it, the more I think that having our data in RDF
>>> would be a tremendous win, also in terms of programming.
>>  
>> Show me!
> 
> Nice try ;-)

Yeah I thought so :-D

I just spend some time trying to envision what gump would like codewise with
a RDF triplestore at its core. It would be a lot more like an application
that uses a database for all its storage, except that the database stores
triples instead of rows. You'd then have lots of RDQL (or similar) queries
sprankled throughout the codebase.

That wouldn't look very nice or easy to understand at all. Adam and now I in
his footsteps have worked pretty hard to make the distance between the
conceptual model (in the form of clean python objects) and its XML
representation huge, simply because that makes the majority of the code a
lot easier to understand.

Using RDF at the core instead of an object model would mean you would need
to understand RDF and how we map our conceptual model onto RDF in order to
be productive in development. That would not be nice. We have enough
concepts in there already.

Unless, of course, you could build a "magic" autogenerated model where
property setting and getting actually triggers interaction with the RDF
datastore. Not magical object-relational but magical object-triple mapping.
And, once you go there, it turns out that it doesn't matter that much right
now whether we move to RDF or not; we can just develop our plugins against
the "manual model" and do something "magic" later.

You may know I'm a little shy about "magic" (where's my little essay on that
again :-D); experience showed that a very smart sax-based xml-querying
automodelling is very possible (sam wrote one, remember) and very hard to
understand.

So, ehm, no, I don't actually think it'll be a tremendous win. It'll bring
some huge benefits, but it'll incur a big cost as well. Simplicity loss.

Or maybe not. I'm not exactly an expert here. We do have one of those around
I think. Hence: "Show me!"

:-D

Cheers,

LSD



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