Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-11 Thread Cees de Groot

Shane Hathaway [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
That's one reason ZODB is so nice.  You can write an application without
writing a formal schema.

One of the reasons I am seriously considering to migrate our production
database from PostgreSQL to ZODB. I am about to implement our product
database, and it is just too darn complex to bother maintaining SQL tables for
it...

Actually OracleStorage and bsddbstorage, recently released, are designed
to address concerns about performance and reliability, and they do an
excellent job at it.  And I consider ZODB as real an OODB as anything
else.  (In some ways it's the best out there IMHO.)

I heard that OracleStorage was quite a bit slower? And from what I've seen
from FileStorage, it's a basic transaction log - what can be more reliable
than that?

Are people using ZODB for non-Zope data? I'd be very interested to discuss
things like emulating extents, patterns for indexing, etcetera...



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Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with

2001-05-11 Thread Cees de Groot


[EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
 The only problem with this is that lambdas are not safe for TTW
 scripting 8^(.

I think that TTW scripting and heavy duty application development are very 
incompatible with each other, so that's not a problem :-)


-- 
Cees de Groot   http://www.cdegroot.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD  1986 F303 937F E098 9E8B



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Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-11 Thread Cees de Groot

Joachim Werner [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
[...]. E.g. how would
you handle objects beloning to more than one container? In SQL this is easy
(Just have a table that matches key pairs from the container table and the
item table). And I don't know any good way of implementing many-to-many
relations in object hierarchies. Let alone querying them efficiently.

Probably I'm daft because it is Friday night, but AFAIK ZODB and most OODB's
store an object only once, keyed by its object id. The rest is just references
through that oid, so objects that belong to more than one container can be
added to all these containers and n:m relations are implemented by having a
list of objects on both sides. 


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Re: [Zope-dev] Re: [Geeks] Interface Meta Data proposal

2000-11-28 Thread Cees de Groot

Jeffrey P Shell [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
But I'm not sure how one would go about setting your meta-data in a way that
is at all natural to Python.  I think that exceptions that a method
must\should raise *should* be part of a signature\contract.  This is one of
the really cool things about Java.  If you use a method, 'readFile' that
says it raises IOError, you *HAVE* to catch that exception (I believe in
order to compile).

It's so cool, it really chills your productivity. The moment that Python
starts doing that, I'll drop the language like a hot iron.

'Nuff about thermodynamics. Making exceptions statically checked is
probably the worst misfeature of Java. The idea is nice, in that it
forces you to deal with exceptions, but in reality it gets in the way
too soon - when you're still exploring, refactoring, stuff like that
you should be able to turn the damn things off. I've got five years
of full-time Java programming behind me, so I know what I'm talking about.

But it looks like what you're really wanting is to use
interfaces for documentation purposes, not for contract purposes.  Not for
interfaces at this level of the language.

Useful documentation, especially contracts, can be useful programmatically so
stuff like that should at least be setup so that it is possible to move it
into the language. A bit like the @pre and @post tags in Javadoc comments -
they're always nice to have as documentation, but when you run iContract over
them, they are activated and start checking your code's behavior.

If you don't say you implement
'Cloneable', an exception gets raised (even if you implement the proper
method). 

Another wart in Java that is nice in theory, but sits in your way in practice.
I greatly prefer the Smalltalk "protocols" approach, where implementing an 
interface is accomplished by implementing the right methods period. The
funny thing is, hardly any Smalltalk code ever checks for the interface: the
(correct) assumption is that if you hand something over to some other thing
that says it wants to iterate over whatever you handed over, you'd better be
sure that the thing behaves at least enough like a collection so that it can
be iterated over. That's the caller's responsibility (a sort of implicit
precondition), and if the caller sends over something else, you get a
DoesNotUnderstand exception. 

Very often I have longed in Java for the possibility of an object to implement
a subset of behavior of another object, but that's not possible. For example,
if you have a bunch of field labels you stuff in a collection just to be able
to do getText()/setText() on them (say for internationalization). Now, I want
to add menu labels to that collection, they also have getText()/setText() so
they would be good citizens in that collection. Java does not allow that,
unless I'm prepared to jump through instanceof/type casting hoops (which is
only possible if I'm the one actually calling getText()/setText()).


This is similar to how we sniff things today, but we just do
things like 'if hasattr(obj, "cb_isCopyable") and obj.cb_isCopyable()):'

The usual answer of an OO guru here is that if statements are considered
harmful, and that if statements that check object types are considered very
harmful. The modern variant is "these are strong refactoring smells".


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Cees de Groot   http://www.cdegroot.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Re: [Zope-dev] Re: [Geeks] Re: Interface Meta Data proposal

2000-11-28 Thread Cees de Groot

Guido van Rossum [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
When you've fully debugged an application, you turn both off.
When you've fully debugged a library module, you create two versions:
one with both turned off, for use in fully debugged applications, and
one with pre-conditions on and post-conditions off, for use by other
code that is still in need of debugging.

I've heard that this works very well, and in Python 3000 (when we have
optional static typing) I would love to add this to Python.  If it's
not feature bloat.

It works very well in fully debugged applications. In the 99.99% other
applications, advice is to leave the assertions on during production
time so your app will fail fast when a bug pops up (profiling will
point you to the two assertions that needs to be turned off for 
acceptable performance).

Personally, but I'm talking without too much thinking here, I think
support for assertions in Python should be based on generic support
for metaprogramming - there's more than DBC that could benefit from
that (aspect-oriented programming, etcetera).


-- 
Cees de Groot   http://www.cdegroot.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD  1986 F303 937F E098 9E8B

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