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The latest release of the Elephant persistent object store is now available.<BR>
It is numbered 0.6.0. It may be obtained from the project page either <BR>
as a downloaded tgz file, or you make access it via anonymous CVS.<BR>
<BR>
<A HREF="http://common-lisp.net/project/elephant/">http://common-lisp.net/project/elephant/</A><BR>
<BR>
Ian Eslick made most of the code contributions to this release, which <BR>
features a very elegant method of indexing the slots of a persistent class.<BR>
For developers, the internals of Elephant were also significantly refactored <BR>
by Ian. Additionally, a layer of data management on top of Elephant that <BR>
implements a Director-like pattern called Data Collection Management has<BR>
been added to the contrib directory.<BR>
<BR>
In addition to personally thanking Ian, I would like to say that I personally<BR>
think Elephant has grown into an extraordinarily useful project. Let me <BR>
just review the major advantages of Elephant as a persistent object store:<BR>
<BR>
1) Extraordinarily convenient for the programmer,<BR>
2) An extensive test suite,<BR>
3) Tested on several major LISP implementations (ACL, SBCL, OpenMCL),<BR>
4) Ability to use multiple back-end data repositories and to migrate whole<BR>
data stores seamlessly between those repositories,<BR>
5) Ability to BerkeleyDB, PostGres, SQLite 3, and probably other back-end<BR>
databases,<BR>
6) Extremely convenient slot and functional indexing that can be dynamically<BR>
changed.<BR>
<BR>
The overall effect of these features together is that Elephant is very flexible for<BR>
serious application development: you can change fundamental implementation <BR>
decisions easily as your application evolves.<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
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----<BR>
Robert L. Read, PhD read &T robertlread.net<BR>
Consider visiting Progressive Engineering: http://robertlread.net/pe<BR>
In Austin: 912-8593 "Think globally, Act locally." -- RBF<BR>
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