packing, thinking about versions 1 & 2 of COODBMS

Today my priority is on getting ready for the move to Raipur. Movers will be here Monday and our train leaves on Tuesday evening. But it is also a good time to think things out. COODBMS is at a point where I just need to crank out the rest of the commands for Browse and write some howto docs, and that doesn't allow for much deep thinking.

Priority 1 is of course flushing out Browse and writing those docs. Then all that is left is to stabalize COODBMS so that new releases can run against old databases. At this point the only thing which prevents this the access control--new operations added to the server can not be used without updating all the existing branches. But there is an easy fix to that: scripts.

So the plan now is to have browse runable in script mode and have all future changes to the access control structures released as scripts. Old branches can then be updated easily and new branches will need to have a script run to configure them. The samples showing how to reconfigure access control then should also have sample script files. This all should be quite managable for a COODBMS administrator.

Once version 1 of COODBMS is out, I see a need for a version 2 which focuses on applications. First, we need to model an application. COODBMS should then come with a model of access control as well as a model of application models. But we also need to address extensibility. So the structures defining an application should also define the factory plugins--these would be run at startup and when an application is "installed". Also once we have the ability to model application structures we can implement a smart version of browse which uses the model. All this would be version 2, which should be quite interesting.