Alan Grimes <alangrimes at starpower.net> writes:
 
> BTWBTW: How do you manage persistant data from within the squeak immage?
> TNhere was some talk about using squeak as a database system but how do
> you find instances of data objects that may be in the immage? 

You may wantto search the swiki about persistency.

The main issue about databases is not persistency but transactions and
concurrent access by multiple users. This issue is solved by OODBMS
like Magma (free), GemStone (commercial) and some others (Cees is
working on a port of a system I forgot the name of)

Some Java programmers believe that because they can serialize and save
any object, building databases from java would be easy.

I would guess that using the image as a poor-man's-database is quite
easy. You just have to make sure you find your objects again. This
means you somehow have to hook them to Smalltalk (the global
dictionary).

One way would be to create a global variable MyDatabase, let it point
to a Dictionary or some other sort of collection, populate this with
your objects or other collections, so in the end you have a tree whose
root is known.

PoolDirctionaries may be another option, but I have never used these
and I believe you know them better than I do.