Trial Balloon: A new DataStore Architecture?
Derek Atkins
warlord@MIT.EDU
01 Nov 2000 13:03:47 -0500
Thanks. I've taken a look and there are two major problems.
1) I could not find any form of security model in the GOODS
documentation. Without even a stated security model, I
would not trust any distributed system to maintain any sort
of financial information. Indeed, even with a stated
security model, I wouldn't trust it unless that model met
my criteria.
Security model notwithstanding, I could find no
documentation regarding the network protocols involved,
user/client authentication, or encryption of the network
stream.
2) GOODS is written in C++, but GnuCash is solely written in
C. One of the nice benefits is that C is still a more
portable language than C++. Also, interfacing between C
and C++ can vary widely depending on the compiler and
linker tools. As a result, I believe the GnuCash team
would prefer to keep the code restricted to C. Granted, I
cannot speak for the team, but I believe that is the
current concensus.
Again, thanks for the pointer. GOODS does look like an interesting
project, but I don't think it's quite appropriate, at this stage,
for GnuCash.
-derek
Timothy Reaves <treaves@silverfields.com> writes:
> Please have a look at GOODS. We are currently using it for many
> projects, and even employing the author to improve the product to meet
> needs we have, while returning those changes to the open source
> community.
>
> GOODS is a fully distributed, transactional, Object Oriented database
> that can be used in an embedded mode. CallBacks are supported. It is
> available for C++, Java, and even perl. XML overlays are supported as
> well. Backing up and restoring are there as well. I think it would be
> perfect for GNUCash!
>
> And it's free, of course!
>
> http://www.ispras.ru/~knizhnik/goods.html
>
> Look at the authors home page as well. He has written several
> different databases, for several different languages, both OO & flat.
>
> Derek Atkins wrote:
>
> > I've been thinking about the Disk-File vs. Database arguments for a
> > while, and I think there are some broader architectural changes to the
> > current datastore model that would need to be made before any kind of
> > multi-access could be implemented. My thesis is that if we can move
> > to a more "object-oriented" data storage model, it would make it
> > easier to add new distributed functionality such as database storage
> > or even a client/server network-protocol system.
> >
>
--
Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB)
URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/ PP-ASEL N1NWH
warlord@MIT.EDU PGP key available