[ANN] iStoa, a project using Magma

[Hilaire Fernandes]

Hello, 

This is just a brief note to let you know I am using Magma as a backend for
an education application of interactive exercise for primary schools. Magma
is used to record all the student achievements. It is still in active
development stage and stuff can be look at http://www.istoa.net (only in
French but Google will translate it easily in English). Nothing usable for
end users.

The OO nature of the Magma persistency is very important as it greatly
enhance the abstraction level of the persisted data (no flat data but
living instances). Basicly I record in Magma the exercice instances of the
student (and some more), but also EventRecord so the whole student activity
can be replayed. The OO level just greatly help to persist a wide range of
exercices instance without to worry about the specific interactive nature
of the exercices (the benefice is huge)

Part of the application is also using Seaside so the teacher can
review the student achievement. In the Seaside application a squeak plugin
with Magma is used to replay the student activity directly from the
browser.

All in all, Magma is nice, but I fell that ODB require more carefull
design compare to RDB. So more attention is required but the reward is
hudge ;-)

Hilaire Fernandes