[7275] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: WWW as Object System (was: Embedding of Mime parts)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul Everitt)
Sat Jan 21 05:19:35 1995
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 1995 10:23:59 +0100
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: paul@cminds.com
From: Paul Everitt <paul@cminds.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
On Fri, 20 Jan 1995, Steve Waterbury wrote:
> Steve Majewski writes:
>
> > .... The Web is really a sort
> > of poor man's distributed object system already.
First, hi Steve M! Ironic, running into you out here.
> EXACTLY! I think once database application developers realize
> that the best way to use an RDBMS is as a "smart index/query
> engine" for "Web objects" (i.e., _only_ put into the DBMS the
> attributes you want to use to search for the objects, plus the
> URL/URN/URC), "database applications" will become much more
> efficient and flexible, and there will never be a need for an
> OODBMS!
I disagree with this. We developed an object system behind a Web server
for an online service. It used a persistent object model (built out of
Python for the prototype), allowing the invoking of methods,
creation/deletion of objects, etc. I had previously done a project like
that using the miniSQL relational database, and I'd never want to do that
again.
The problem becomes arbitrary changes in attributes, as defined by HTML
forms. Whenever you want to add another data element, you'd have to drop
the table and recreate it. With the Python persistent object model, just
changing the HTML form definition changed what was put in the object
store. Plus, we had some of the objects that implemented methods
differently, for customizing the behavior. Don't know how you'd do that
kind of overloading with stored procedures.
Anyway, objects behind Web servers are awesome.
--Paul
Paul Everitt V 703.371.6909 Email Paul.Everitt@cminds.com
Connecting Minds, Inc. F 703.371.1201 WWW http://www.cminds.com/
