Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Universal Data Repository

Author:Tom Fuerstner
Posted:7/4/2000; 10:14:48 AM
Topic:Universal Data Repository
Msg #:18328
Prev/Next:18327 / 18329

hi,

From a symbian.com promotion-text:

A conservative estimate is that by 2003 there will be over one billion wireless web users worldwide - the requirement for a common operating system among mobile devices is becoming more, not less, urgent. There is a clear evolutionary path for the mass adoption of Internet-capable wireless devices and, as a de facto standard......

Especially in Europe the situation for wireless web-devices is even more exciting. It's for sure that in Europe ( cause of GSM networks)by 2002 more peeople will be connected to the internet via handy than via desktop computers.

Considering this case a reality it means that people want at the same time ubiquitous access to any kind of data and to be able to manipulate their personal data in serveral ways while beeing on the road . What the users really expect is a kind of universal data repository that stores their data and helps them to handle their dataflow efficiantly.

From my point of view Frontier is more than approbriate for this kind of tasks. It is not just an ideal dataspace for personal data. It's very special potential is to be a central database for different applications. Now more than ever with it's support for data-exchange-standards like XML, XML-RPC, Avantgo, RSS and SOAP. Today Frontier is delivering more capabilities and flexibility than any other product on the market. But not enough with this, frontiers power combined with the workflow-possibilities of Apple Events on the mac allows everyone to solve complex workflow tasks with ease. ( Less the same is true for COM on Windows)

So what i want to know is wether Userland is interested to cooperate with and support an insitution that is going to develop frontier applications in accordance with the mainresponder-architecture esspecially for the wireless market. Concerning this case we have very specific interests to tie on Frontier's ODB much closer to an industrial strength database. We've already done this with ODBC and with XML-RPC but it doesn't scale the way we expect.

To give you a concrete problem we are dealing with is the following. We are not just storing stories with the date as general key. Every peace of content we deliver to Frontiers ODB should also be structured through GPS-information. This means that we store together with every discussiongroup message where it has been created concerning the physical location of its author. Thats the simple part of the story. The reason for this is that we can now call our content in a very interesting way. E.G.: you can use your WAP-Device to call ODB-stored content with questions like: my actual position is longitude xxx and latitude yyy. please send me back all messages that have been put into the database where the author of the messages has been located within a radius of 10 kilometers of my actual position.

I know this sounds a little bit far out but it is in reality incredible useful. Re-Connecting content-data to real physical locations is more than just useful.

All this was worked out in Frontier very fast but trouble begins when the amount of messages exceeds a number of 10000. to manipulate table of this size kills my frontier.exe everytime. This is one of the reasons why we are looking for a tighter database integration into frontiers odb.

by Tom Fuerstner

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