> "Stephen Pair" <spair at advantive.com> wrote:
> > > You want to be able to run stuff out of the database?
> > > Data-objects that are byecode for Squeak, or native code 
> for your CPU?
> > 
> > Yes, think of it this way: forget about the database for second and 
> > imagine a squeak image that has a bunch of ByteArrays, 
> which happen to 
> > be files for various types of systems.  A WebDAV or NFS server in 
> > Squeak would allow me to mount those files and use any normal 
> > operating system tool to manipulate them.
> 
> Ok.  But what would be the advantage of this?

Of what?  Having WebDAV?  Or storing the files in Squeak?  By storing
files in Squeak I can easily associate all kinds of meta data with them
and their persistence is automatic...also, they reside in the same place
as all of my other objects associated with a particular application.
Eventually, Swiki.net will use this to store files that people upload to
their Swikis.

As for WebDAV, any of the benefits lost by putting the files in Squeak
are regained (like using vi to edit an HTML template for example).

> How are you representing hierarchy (folders) in BDB/Squeak?  
> Does BDB have any sense of hierarchy- ithought it was just a 
> persistent hash table (more or less) ?

Correct, BDB essentially turns your hard drive into a large content
addressable memory...which is all you need to store any object in
Squeak.  So, I don't use BDB to represent a hierarchy...I use it to
store objects.  So, BDB is really beside the point about how to
represent folders in Squeak.

A Dictionary (or subclass of Dicitonary) works nicely for creating
hierarchies of things.

- Stephen