Comment Re:Oh really? (Score 1) 553
I'm not usually one to say, "no big deal, this has been done before" but seriously... this time it really is no big deal, its been done before. Hell, lots of API's for this sort of stuff even already exist, some of them even come with OSes.
Can you name some examples?
(The rest is more my thoughts than a reply to anyone in particular...)
I have been experimenting how to do this in a generic way with db4o in C# (an object database for Java/.NET), and putting my own notification on top of the objects as well as the database events to enable (as an option) immediate persistance of object changes the way you mention you do with config files. I still had to do work to do this, though -- it's 2009, and this has probably been done in feeble and fantastic ways 100's or 1000's of times, if not more, and where is the reusable wisdom gained? I get upset with the naysayer crowds who want to stick with tried and true methods of doing everything manually over and over, just because they've gotten comfortable with it and don't want to learn or think about anything new.
People mention Squeak/scheme/smalltalk, and I have marveled at how cool it is and wished I could delve into it, but seriously, is it a practial platform ready for mainstream? Being a mainly
I did set up and do a bit of coding for Zope (Plone) on Python, and loved some of the advantages of the object database system there (even though it was still hierarchical), for finer-grained objects where it would be annoying to create files everywhere.
Sure, big monolithic files have their place, like OpenOffice documents, but nobody's putting a gun to your head to tell you that you must chop that OOo doc up into 1000 tiny objects... that would be insanity, and to assume someone else is insane just shows close-mindedness and a lack of imagination. (Quote from the FAQ: "And objects can be huge. No limit.")
In general, I like to see common design patterns like this moved lower and pushed as a standard, either into the language or widely-used libraries. I'm glad C# made events and properties first class entities. I'm glad the SOA bandwagon camped around the observer pattern and basically built a sub-industry that pushed standard ways to do MOM and topic based routers with JMS AMQP etc. What do we have for objects that should be persisted? How are we going to make the semantic web with interesting bits of information if nobody bothers to notice that the barrier to entry to bridging semantic web to monolithic file structures is too high?
I think a good programming framework (probably cross-language... I know there are some ODBMSs out there like Objectivity that are more multiplatform than db4o's Java/.NET) would be great, and while I am not the type to venture out and create an entire OS around this concept, it will be interesting to see if someone can create a sound foundation with a suite of desktop-domain apps that establish that there are some useful low-level mechanisms that may be reasonable foundations for (a chunk of) general development. I think all this may have been tried before with WinFS, and quite a few interesting things came of that (hierarchical db structure, big files in the RDBMS, a generalized extensible sync framework). Hopefully this Russian guy knows what he's doing and will do something interesting with this, and maybe take a standardized workable environment further than MS did (or go more mainstream than Squeak / Zope, etc).
Anyway, while I may share some of the skepticism of the scoffers commenting about the near-term viability of this as an OS, I applaud the effort to rethink some things, and hopefully some bits of progress will come out of this experiment. I think things like Squeak, Zope/Python, and WinFS have started popularizing and standardizing some useful capabilities that have not yet had a top-notch execution.
