Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Maybe it's time to re-think what web development should be about

I just came about this link and am currently half-way through Dan Ingall's Google TechTalk. Wow!

Btw, there is also Smalltalk in Flash.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Object oriented database management systems

Recently, there were several blog posts about ODBMSs. It all started with this interview of Michael Stonebraker.
Dan Weinreb (ex ObjectStore) responded and today I read a blog post of Oracle's John Russell.

In the early/mid 90ies, when I was still on university and hooked on OO, ODBMSs had a big fascination for me. I read every book and paper about them I could get and had uni accounts on machines to play with Gemstone and ObjectStore. Hell, I even wrote one myself, in c++ and tcl (chaos - chris' alternative object store;-)).

Accidently, my first job was with Oracle 7 and Forms/Reports, "boring" technology or so I thought. This changed quickly, when I realized how efficient development in this environment was. It turned out that I didn't need all that fancy OO stuff I thought indispensable to get things done and have fun working. In some way, programming pl/sql even reminds me of the Gemstone/Smalltalk days. My interface seems minimalistic in comparison (sql*plus and vi), but it's only the interface to that powerful, persistent multiuser sql and pl/sql machine.