At 08:19 PM 3/9/2005, Yanni Chiu wrote:
>Any ideas on how difficult it would be to create
>an RDB repository for MC. I've glanced over the
>code already, and it *seems* simple enough.
>Another thought is to map directly to the
>VW Store schema. Any thoughts?

It would certainly be nice to be able to have Monticello able to talk 
directly to a Store repository. It would be a lot nicer than filing out and 
in with format converters. And at some point we're going to have to do a 
thorough, non-backward-compatible revision of the Store schema to get rid 
of a lot of nagging problems with it. It'd be nice to be able to move 
towards something common.

There is a fairly portable mechanism for talking to a Store repository 
using Glorp. It's in the Cincom public repository as StoreGlorp. Fairly 
portable means it's supposed to be portable, and every once in a while I 
get around to making sure. I had it running at demo-level in VisualAge last 
fall in order to be able to demo browsing a Store repository from VA for 
ESUG, and in ObjectStudio to do the same at the Cincom conference in 
December. It's on my to-do list to have a serious look at Monticello and 
interoperability options - but unfortunately the list is long.  I'd 
certainly be happy to help out if anybody was interested in looking at it 
before I get around to it.

The most serious obstacle to having non-VW systems talk directly to a Store 
repository is that Store uses BOSS, the VW serialization mechanism, for 
properties. One option is to move to a portable serializer, like SRP. 
Another, which has the short-term advantage of not breaking compatibility 
with old repositories, is to just port BOSS and have it available. I'm 
fairly sure that Cincom would consider this to be in their interest.


--
Alan Knight [|], Cincom Smalltalk Development
knight at acm.org
aknight at cincom.com
http://www.cincom.com/smalltalk

"The Static Typing Philosophy: Make it fast. Make it right. Make it run." - 
Niall Ross