[Persistence-sig] getting started

[Patrick K. O'Brien]

[Jeremy Hylton]
>
> It looks like many of the people who expressed interest in the SIG
> have subscribed to the list, so we ought to get started.  I think we
> should begin with some introductions and a review of the SIG charter.
>
> Introductions: Please tell us about your interest in the persistence
> SIG, what personal/professional goals you have for it, and how much
> time & energy you have.  (Feel free to lurk if that's your preference.)

Sounds good to me. I've been programming in Python for about a year and a
half now, and various other languages for the past 15 years. I've also done
a lot of work with relational databases and data modeling. I'm the author of
PyCrust (a Python shell written in wxPython) and a developer on the
PythonCard project (an app building framework for wxPython). I've created a
couple of websites with Quixote and various utilities with Python. I'm also
in the middle of creating an xhtml-compliant html generator similar to
htmlgen.

My interest in this SIG is directly related to my interest in using ZODB
outside of Zope to create medium-sized applications with persistent objects
instead of a traditional relational database approach using SQL. I think
ZODB is very good, but more could be done to make it easier to use by
someone familiar with relational databases. Along those lines I started a
project to make ZODB easier, called Bulldozer, and you can get the code from
SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/bdoz. There isn't any
documentation so the only clues to my intent are in the source and unit
tests and this wiki page at http://www.orbtech.com/wiki/BullDozer.
Unfortunately, I haven't had the time or energy to make any progress on this
project for the past couple of months.

I think there are lots of applications that need persistent data but don't
necessarily need or benefit from a relational database. There is also much
to be gained from not having to translate objects into relational tuples and
back again. And I think have good persistence support in the Python core
would be a really good selling point for Python. Transparent persistence is
also a hot item on the PythonCard project right now.

I've got a lot of interest in this topic so I'll do my best to make time
available. I'm on vacation all next week and then I'll be at OSCON. It would
be great to discuss this topic in person there. Does anyone plan to set up a
Birds-of-a-feather session at OSCON?

--
Patrick K. O'Brien
Orbtech
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