OmniBase is dead.
I killed it.
The replacement with GLORP has been successful. Rate of error discovery has stabilized and, after about 3 weeks of production experience and many small fixes, is now below OmniBase’s on its best day.
A few things I’ve learned along the way:
1) Put limits on all search queries. All of them. Too many times in the last couple weeks the system became unresponsive for a couple minutes as it fetched every blessed row in the database. If you’re getting that much stuff, you’re not gonna find it. I’ve limited all searches to 20 rows.
2) Use plain old objects wherever possible. OODBs have a history of being rotten at schema migration. So all objects used dictionaries for ivar storage. This makes it easy to add or remove ivars without getting messed up in the OODB as the object’s ‘format’ is always the same. However, all that hashing and fetching, and searching, isn’t free. I didn’t realize how expensive it was until I ripped it out and replaced them with vanilla ivars. Zooooom!
Because the mapping is from the objects to the RDBMS through GLORP on an attribute level rather than relying on blitting a whole object as a chunk, the format of the objects is decoupled from the database representation. Changes in the object’s binary format has no bearing on the database representation.
3) When generating accessors – add lazy initialization where nil is not an acceptable value.
4) Keep it meta. The meta model is the most important thing we have. With a good meta model all else can be rapidly replaced. Consequently, I think the next step in evolution – conversion of the meta model to use Magritte and then replacement of the UI to use Magritte as well, will radically improve agility.
Meanwhile, to prepare, I’m updating the version of Seaside that the application is built on. This is turning out to be harder than I thought as Seaside has moved on quite a bit and many classes in my old version have been simply replaced in the newer one.
The really great thing about using meta facilities like glorp and magritte, is that the application continues to shrink until it is mostly just the meta model.
Less code, less bugs.