Sven Van Caekenberghe (the author of cl-prevalence) and I used this approach to power the back-end/cms of a concert hall back in 2003. A write-up of our experiences can be found at http://homepage.mac.com/svc/RebelWithACause/index.html
The combination of a long-running Lisp image with a remote REPL and the flexibility of the object prevalence made it a very enjoyable software development cycle. It's possibly even more applicable with the current memory prices.
I especially liked the fact that your mind never needs to step out of your object space. No fancy mapping or relationship tables, just query the objects and their relations directly. I guess that's what SmallTalk developers also like about their programming environment.
we started with cl-prevalence and then of course (NIH-syndrome) implemented our own approach to this back in 2003, which you can find at http://bknr.net/ . We used it back then to run eboy.com, and it still is powering http://quickhoney.comhttp://www.createrainforest.org/ and http://ruinwesen.com/ amongst others. Those transaction logs + images are for some 6+ years old, and have gone through multiple code rewrites and compiler changes and OS changes and what not. It is good fun, has drawbacks, has advantages, definitely widens your horizon.
Sven Van Caekenberghe (the author of cl-prevalence) and I used this approach to power the back-end/cms of a concert hall back in 2003. A write-up of our experiences can be found at http://homepage.mac.com/svc/RebelWithACause/index.html
The combination of a long-running Lisp image with a remote REPL and the flexibility of the object prevalence made it a very enjoyable software development cycle. It's possibly even more applicable with the current memory prices.
I especially liked the fact that your mind never needs to step out of your object space. No fancy mapping or relationship tables, just query the objects and their relations directly. I guess that's what SmallTalk developers also like about their programming environment.