The db4o User Conference 2008 held in Berlin just ended and it was a complete success! Before providing a summary of what went on in the conference I would like to thank all the attendees for making this possible (we had dVPs and db4o users from China, Germany, Brazil, Denmark, The Netherlands, South Africa, Chile, USA, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, France and more).
dDC (Developer Conference) and the Roadmap
One of the first activities was to agree on the roadmap for db4o (note that some of our dVPs participated in the process). And here's the list of top priorities:
- Fast Collections - Build in Java
- Pluggable indexing
- Indexed Collections
- Collections - Build in .NET
- More paralleism in core (FSM)
- FITnesse: users submit query code
- Convert PolePosition to .NET
- NQ Optimized
- Decaf
- Modularization
- Public build systems
- Release Sharpen & Decaf GPL
- Support Aggregate Queries
- Store objects on creation
- Improve dRS collection support
- Sync with MSFT SQL Server (build) - ADO data objects
- Scalability Charts
- Transparent clustering (cross db reference)
...among other features. Please note that the roadmap is agile, only a current order of priorities and subject to changes, as new market insight arises, and not bound to any dates.
What do you think? We appreciate your feedback on this!
Pairing and Paircasts
XP is in the heart of db4o, specially when it comes to pairing practices among our developers. Our Paircasts are a natural extesion to XP practices which allow a more effective sharing of knowledge among the team and the db4o community at large by making available recordings of interesting pairing sessions.
In order to let the community know about the internals of pairing sessions within db4o, Carl and Rodrigo offered a live pairing session during the conference where they implemented "delete by query" in less than an hour!
You can download the paircasts from our Paircasts blog or watch them on line at blip.tv
db4o Java IDE plugins
Gerd Klevesaat joined us in Berlin and showed us the Netbeans plugin for db4o in detail. The implementation looks great but Gerd noted that it wasn't requirement driven. So we invite you to tell us: what features would you like to see in your db4o IDE plugin? Gerd plans to add more features such as NativeQuery and SQL query support and he welcomes your feedback!
Object Manager Enterprise (OME) offering
A nice introduction to the latest commercial db4o database exploration and support tool by Tetyana Loskutova. OME provides a rock solid exploration and query tool for Eclipse or Visual Studio seamlessly integrated into db4o's support portal. Go ahead and try OME! (For more info contact sales@db4o.com)
Spring and db4o
A dynamic and right-to-the-point presentation by Chris Beams who shows how db4o can also be useful in a corporate context (e.g. SOA, rapid prototyping). The talk included details about how Spring supports db4o. "Database is no longer the integration layer", nicely put!
JPOX and db4o
Do you want to comply to Java persistence standards and still use db4o? Andy Jefferson introduced JPOX and its support for db4o. Supported standards are JPA, JDO and also there's an initial support for JDOQL. Future plans are support for SODA queries and SQL. You can reach Andy here.
LINQ adapter for db4o
JB Evain showed us how to leverage the current LINQ support on db4o. An elegant implementation to say the least (the low level query mechanism of db4o is used behind the scene (SODA) and the queries fall back transparently to LINQ for Objects when they cannot be optimized). This functionality is already available in the latest version of db4o for .NET.
Eiffel-db4o connector
Presentation of a connector that allows objects to be persisted on db4o under Eiffel for .NET. This is an excellent ongoing work provided by ETH Zurich student Ruihua Jin (supervised by Marco Piccioni). More information is available in our ProjectSpaces.
db4o Web Application
A web application demo by Victor Munzenmayer shows us how to use db4o under a .NET web environment. Web applications with db4o persistence to solve real problems are possible!
The Sovereign platform
A really interesting concept. Klaus Wuestefeld showed us how to get our freedom back while remaining tightly integrated to the Internet. From CPU sharing to a relative security system to app sharing (maybe using persistence with db4o), the Sovereign platform is a must see.
The presentations from the conference are available in our presentations section. If you want to see some photos from the event see this page.
THANK YOU guys!
German Viscuso
db4o community manager