Cees de Groot wrote:
> Jimmie Houchin <jhouchin at texoma.net> said:
> 
>>I can as necessary, if need be (do I need more disclaimers :), can 
>>upgrade to VW since I can enter for the $500 and use OmniBase (for $?). 
> 
> $395. And I think that for $895, you won't find a better
> development/deployment environment :-).
> 
>>In general I prefer open source both philosophically and monetarily.
> 
> Yup. Although, as far as I'm concerned and for practical purposes, I value
> access to source code more than strict conformance to OSD's etcetera, so VW
> is quite passable. As long as I can hack...

Understood and agreed. I am not a Gnu frontman. :) I like other licenses 
as well depending on the purpose of the software. I am also not 
anti-proprietary necessarily. I do prefer open source.

My preference to open source starts with the fortune (by my definition, 
a few thousand $) I spent on Prograph CPX software. Interesting 
software. Something that could be developed from Squeak. (I haven't 
explored SqC graphical development yet.) But the company Pictorius 
decided not support the subscribers and never delivered to me the 
software promised. Most people just moved on. The company didn't have 
the resources (money) to deliver on the promises. :(
comp.lang.prograph used to be a nice forum. Now its dead.

The company still exists and the product they promised me they now 
have... but oh well. I would not choose to use it today as it is still 
very proprietary and does not include the Linux/Unix OS.

http://www.pictorius.com/prograph.html
http://www.taylor-design.com/datalink/overview.htm

My reasons begin pragmatically and practically. I do in general like the 
open source spirit. It would be nice if Alan could get Apple/Disney to 
re-release Squeak with an MIT license like I believe he said he would 
like in a previous message. (If I understood correctly.)

I have nothing against VW. I want to get further on my project in Squeak 
and determine whether or not VW offers me on this project something of 
value for the price paid. I currently don't know yet.

I don't put VW anywhere near the issues I had with Pictorius. Depending 
on the project many things could be ported to similar systems. No such 
option with Prograph. So there isn't quite the tremendous vendor lock-in.

> BTW: for me, OmniBase is new as well. Now that I'm starting to put serious
> amounts of data into it, I've taken up to write an XML object export/import
> tool. The idea is to serialize an object with all its 'by-value' references
> and with pointers to oid's of other persistent objects (and these oid's are
> filenames, so you can easily find them back). I did some experimenting
> yesterday - the format is quite verbose, but gzipped it's ok. With such a
> system in place, I'll have backups outside the database which'll help me sleep
> a lot better...

Sleeping better is good.

I'll definitely still watch Magma. And probably still give it a try, but 
with a PostgreSQL db housing the data also. Might be nice to be able to 
hammer on Magma with a large dataset. Might prove fruitful towards Magma 
or any of the other Squeak technologies being hammered as such to help 
them mature into products that can be trusted by the greater Squeak 
community.

It will be interesting to learn about performance issues of Magma, BDB 
and PGSQL all from a similar Squeak app and dataset.

Maybe I can give something like that a shot when I'm ready.

Jimmie Houchin