Sebastian, this is a neat idea could you give just a little bit more 
detail on how the objects are mapped into the SQL database?  I can only 
guess that you mean that they are somehow chunked  into blobs and persisted.

]{evin
>
> Sebastian Sastre wrote:
>> But an image can be scaled in a farm of servers. A persistent 
>> Smalltalk can
>> have valuable objects transparently stored in a shareable support.
>> I've implemented in Squeak a *proof of concept* of this idea in a system
>> that can store in a relational database the objects without having to 
>> map
>> classes to tables. It uses the same intention that the VM uses to store
>> objects in RAM. It uses the RDBMS as if it where an analogy of the 
>> RAM. I
>> based the design on the blue book. The idea is not original Sun has 
>> played
>> with something like this for Java.
>>
>> Every instar value you change in an object is made ACIDly. Is slow 
>> because
>> the support is slow. Write and read barriers can help a lot. Concurrency
>> also should be managed.
>>
>> But you can make a really big image with this by scaling it as much as
>> PostgreSQL can scale.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Sebastian Sastre
>>
>>
>>  
>>> -----Mensaje original-----
>>> De: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org 
>>> [mailto:squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] En nombre de 
>>> Marcel Weiher
>>> Enviado el: Miércoles, 29 de Agosto de 2007 20:51
>>> Para: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
>>> Asunto: Re: pipe
>>>
>>>
>>> On Aug 26, 2007, at 3:10 AM, Fabio Filasieno wrote:
>>>
>>>    
>>>>> Smalltalk is very different - you always can add behaviour         
>>> you need    
>>>>> to the other object and the application logic is         
>>> distributed across    
>>>>> the system.
>>>>>         
>>>> That's not the point, but you are right, Unix and Smalltalk are 
>>>> different.
>>>> In regard to the black boxes thing.
>>>>       
>>> I think a lot of the differences are superficial, but one seems very
>>> deep:  Unix's unifying principle is extensional, Smalltalk intensional.
>>>
>>> That is, Unix gets its power from the fact that everything is just 
>>> represented as bytes, and you can pipe those around.  Who cares what 
>>> they mean?  To the refined tastes of us Smalltalkers that seems 
>>> barbaric, but it is very powerful in a very pragmatic sort of way, 
>>> and gets you extremely loose coupling and late binding (of things 
>>> other than the fact that it's all just bytes).  Of course, you lose 
>>> moving to higher levels of abstraction, and no, XML doesn't really 
>>> do it.
>>>
>>> Smalltalk, on the other hand, does really well with modelling 
>>> semantics, as objects sending messages, but has a hard time 
>>> extending its unifying principle outside the image.  Which is 
>>> somewhat ironic considering the idea was connecting things and late, 
>>> late binding.
>>>
>>> Marcel
>>>
>>>
>>>     
>>
>>
>>
>>   
>
>