[Seaside] Hybrid persistent idea. Was: Seaside & Ruby Rails Compared

[Dmitry Dorofeev]

David Shaffer wrote:
> Günther Schmidt wrote:
> 
> 
>>Göran,
>>
>>Sort of, persistence is a fundamental problem for any type of
>>programming one does.
>>
>>So a while back I checked all sorts of propagated *solutions* and
>>found none of them to be *ideal*.
> 

It is very interesting to read *any* information about persistent solutions
for Squeak/Smalltalk.

I recently did my first Seaside/OmniBase project (after 7 years of Perl/MySQL)
and found it very easy to start with and make changes later. Access to persistent
objects by navigation is excellent in some cases and really sucks in others.

The typical problem (for me only?) is search by options.
Common example is list of car sale adverts.
Search by model, year, price, location etc. Up to 20 options.
Dealing with 20 indexes in OODBMS manually is quite boring, at least in OmniBase. Doing
searches manually combining OR/AND/NOT logic with 20 indexes is also boring, but
probably with good API it is the same as SQL, or can be similar in some way.
And i recall my expirience with MySQL where reachability by navigation was pain in the ...
for complex DB (assuming slow JOIN implementation), but very pleasant search against a table
of records. So i think that it is a good idea to store my data as objects in say OmniBase
and have plain tables consisting of only necessery fields in say PostgreSQL. So PostgreSQL or MySQL
will take care about indexes and searches returning me ObjectIDs, so i can fetch real objects from
OmniBase. Still some extra work here, but i feel quite comfortable with the idea.

What the list guru thinks about it ?

-Dmitry.