This will take some digesting to grok...
"If the Java Content Repository (JCR) API expert group's vision bears out, in five or ten years' time we will all program to repositories, not databases, according to David Nuescheler, CTO of Day Software [4], and JSR 170 spec lead. Repositories are an outgrowth of many years of data management research, and are best understood as fancy object stores especially suited to today's applications."John Dougan comments...
My goodness, that data model reminds me of RDF. Is there a database/datamodel equivalent to Greenspun's 10th Law?Interesting comparison to think about. For the sake of argument more than having made any real deep theory, I have previously wondered aloud whether there are a small number of common data persistence patterns.
3 comments:
Of course those 'repositories' are just another type of database...
Many of us already do "program to repositories," although -- as janc notes -- it's tough to get relational databases completely out of the loop. In fact, until we have something better with which to replace them (a problem that the JCR folks seem to be punting on), relational databases will remain somewhere at the bottom of any repository stack that aims to be both flexible and scalable.
We've been working on (and using in production systems) XML::Comma for six years, and except for being in Perl, it's pretty similar to what the JCR project looks to be trying to standardize (laugh). It's also stable, useful, and -- like all labors of love in this vein -- does about 10% of what we imagine it could do.
For Comma, we try to use the filesystem for what it's good at, and the database for what it's good at. You don't have to know much (if any) SQL, but of course the abstractions are leaky, so scaling anything complex up to, say, a few million (web) users a day requires lots of thinking about how your programmatic 'store()s', 'get_iterator()s' bottom out at the RDBMS layer.
My goodness, that data model reminds me of RDF. Is there a database/datamodel equivalent to Greenspun's 10th Law?
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