port of prevayler

goran.hultgren at bluefish.se goran.hultgren at bluefish.se
Mon Feb 17 16:24:53 UTC 2003


"Masashi Umezawa" <umejava at mars.dti.ne.jp> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > Yes, much better. :-) We have one good language (Smalltalk) why not use
> > it? All this focus on XML (in the IT industry over all that is) is
> > really tiresome.
> 
> Tiresome, indeed. But I think SIXX has some advantages for serious, robust
> systems.
>
> - It automatically resolves circular or shared references.
> (In "do it" approach, you have to write it on your own).

Yes, true. On the other hand Smalltalk can use the "language" of the
model at hand.
Smalltalk is simply a more powerful language than XML. But sure, if we
are talking about simply representing state in an external form
(serializing that is) then I agree - no point in implementing a general
serialzer - there are plenty around including SIXX.

> - It is safe.
> ("Do it" could be a security hall. You can insert dangerous expressions).

True.

> - It is portable.
> (SIXX has been ported to 3 Smalltalks. It can be converted to other data
> structures by processing parsed dom tree).

Yes, SIXX definitely is cool.

> So I think it is oversimplified to say "much better".

Yes, I agree. I wasn't putting down SIXX - I was more cheerfully
noticing that someone remembered the good old chunk format! We sometimes
forget that Smalltalk (the language) can be used for these things. And
you avoid the burden of "yet another language to master".

For example, SqueakMap needs no XML package to do it's logging and since
I use the protocol in the class SqueakMap it is very compact and domain
specific. And I don't really "serialize" anything.

regards, Göran



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