Tantalus gone? Any users?
Colin Putney
cputney at wiresong.ca
Mon Nov 10 18:34:16 UTC 2003
On Nov 10, 2003, at 9:49 AM, Mark A. Schwenk wrote:
> I've started using Tantalus in a couple of applications and am looking
> for more examples of doing inserts and updates with it. Are there any
> active users of it?
Not that I know of. Though I'm theoretically the maintainer, I've not
touched it in about a year, and I don't expect to do any further
development of it.
Tantalus grew out of a specific need I had while migrating a project
from PHP to Smalltalk. The database schema was already well established
and contained large amounts of valuable data. And finally it was using
MyISAM tables in MySQL, so ACID transactions were not available.
Those requirements led to some interesting design choices in Tantalus,
which worked out surprisingly well. Still, wrestling with that problem
has convinced me that OO databases are the way to go. The mismatch
between graphs of objects and relations between rows is deep enough
that you I can't find a general mapping mechanism that doesn't put
significant restraints on the object model, the database schema or
both.
> I've tried accessing some of the links from the SqueakMap entry but
> find they are broken.
The other side to this story is that I no longer work at Whistler.com,
and it seems that they aren't maintaining any of the Smalltalk work
that I did. That's part of the reason I'm not working on Tantalus
anymore - I don't need it now.
I can probably dig up the documentation and make it available on my new
website, if anyone cares enough; and in any case, I can certainly
answer questions and support anyone still using Tantalus.
My own recommendation would be to look into OODBs - GOODS, Magma or
Omnibase. I like GOODS in particular, and have been trying to find some
free time to try out Avi's new client for it. If you must or prefer to
use a relational database, check out Avi's Roe package. It's basically
the successor to Tantalus - it goes off in another direction based on
problems we had writing and using Tantalus.
At this point, I'm content to call Tantalus an interesting experiment
and leave it at that. But again, I'll gladly provide support to anyone
that finds it useful.
Colin
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