priorities

Cowdb now supports handle tables, which have half the disk footprint of persistent tables. Also, PersistentTable and HandleTable now support HashMap as an alternative to TreeMap.

I've started to move from constructor-based IOC to method-based. The code will be cleaner, and this way we can more easily implements cloning of persistent objects. Cloning can then be used to reduce the need for disk reads:

1. When a writable object is needed, it can be copied from the read-only version of the same object.
2. When writing to disk, we can also save a read-only copy for use by subsequent queries & transactions.

I'm still interested in deep copies--this should be a very noteworthy feature. But I fear it will overload the fork table. So next on the list should be support for large hashes.

After deep copies, a b-tree implementation should wrap everything up nicely. Then it's on to phase 2: a Rolonic database.

Feature tracking can be found here: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=106672&atid=645208