Trial Balloon: A new DataStore Architecture?

[Derek Atkins]

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