[Gambas-user] Types? Records?

[Nelson Ferraz]

> Could you describe (in IT terms rather than CS terms) what 
> serializable/persistent/prevalent objects would do for us?  All I can imagine 
> is that "serializable" means "every object of a class gets a serial 
> identifier" which I would assume is already the case

Not exactly that: The idea is that you can convert any complex object
into a string, and then back into an object. (Think of Data::Dumper :))

> , and that "persistent" 
> means "every object has its own routines for saving its state to disk between 
> runs", which I think is a Bad Idea(tm). 

Almost that, but only the objects that you declare as "persistent"
should have their own routines for saving their state.

>  I have no idea what prevalent means 
> unless it means "everything's an object" which I think is already how Gambas 
> works. ;)

Prevalence goes one step further, by allowing ACID transactions, fault
tolerance, replication, and load balancing.

The Prevayler team claims to have achieved most of this with a really
simple class (~ 350 lines of code).

According to them, "You can use any language for which you are able to
find or build a serialization mechanism. In languages where you can
directly access the system's memory and if the business objects are held
in a specific memory segment, you can also write that segment out to the
snapshot file instead of using serialization."

http://www.prevayler.org/wiki.jsp?topic=DoesPrevalenceOnlyWorkInJava

Nelson