Hi,<br>Please comment on the idea and advise on steps to implement it.<br>Real world applications need persistent data, that can be accessed and modified concurrently by several clients, in a way that preserves "happen-before" relationship.<br>
Idea: Design and implement Persistent Concurrent Data Types in Haskell. These data types should mirror existing Data.List , Data.Map and similar types but provide persistency and support consistent concurrent access and modification (or simply - "concurrency").<br>
Persistency and concurrency should be configurable through these type interfaces. Configuration should include:<br>1) Media to persist data, such as file, DBMS, external key-value store (for example Amazon SimpleDB, CouchDB, MongoDB, Redis, etc) <br>
2) Caching policy - when (on what events) and how much data to read/write from/to persistent media. Media reads / writes can be done asynchronously in separate threads.<br>3) Concurrency configuration: optimistic or pessimistic data locking.<br>
<br>One may ask why encapsulate persistency and concurrency in the data type instead of using "native" storage API, such as for example key-value / row-column API that NoSQL databases provide? <br>The answer is simple: APIs that your code use greatly influence the code itself. Using low-level storage API directly in your code results in bloated obscure code, or you need to encapsulate this low-level API in clear and powerful abstractions. So why not to do this encapsulation once and for all for such powerful types as Data.Map, for example, and forget all Cassandra and SimpleDB low-level access method details?<br>
When the right time comes and you will need to move your application to the next new "shiny_super_cloud", you will just write the implementation of NData.Map backed by Data.Map in terms of low-level API of this super-cloud.<br>
<br>(Side note: I really need such a NData.Map type. I was requested to move my code that heavily uses Data.Map and simple text file persistence into Amazon AWS cloud. Looking at SimpleDB API, I realized that I will have to rewrite 90% of code. This rewrite will greatly bloat my code and will make it very unreadable. In case I had NData.Map I would just switch implementation from 'file' to SimpleDB persistency inside my NData.Map type.) <br>
<br>Implementation:<br>To start playing with this idea, NData.Map persisted in a regular file will do, no concurrency yet. Next step - NData.Map persisted in SimpleDB or Cassandra or Redis, with concurrent access supported.<br>
<br>So it looks like NData.Map should be a monad ... <br>Any ideas on implementation and similar work? <br><br>Thanks! <br clear="all">Dmitri<br>---<br><a href="http://sites.google.com/site/dokondr/welcome" target="_blank">http://sites.google.com/site/dokondr/welcome</a><br>
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