Fanciful Magic

Object Prevalence

I found this page. I got to it by reading Bill Clementson's excellent blog. The idea sounds crazy, but it seems Klaus Wuestefeld has thrown out our ideas of databases out the window and started over. His idea is simply: Why mess with RDMSs at all? They are complicated and too big of a tool for most systems. His solution is to keep objects in memory taking snapshots and keeping a log of changes to the objects. Now, what does that sound like? It sounds just like a Smalltalk/Lisp image to me! It seems he's an ex-Smalltalker that took the idea of images to the Java masses. The idea seems crazy to the Java developers and I must admit that I never thought of taking images to a much higher level! Now, what would be really cool would be to extend this idea and allow code changes in your logs. This takes out a lot of the pain out of conversions and putting in new code.

So, this idea gives us faster systems, more realibity (less code to mess up in persistence layers), and most importantly: SIMPLICITY. This is the best example I've seen of doing "the simplest possible thing"!