[CompStrm Wiki] hardly any work done today, but

[Bill la F. <laf...@ya...>]

Thomas (who is also on this list) came for a visit this evening. He is a coworker at Sun Microsystems and was an employee of mine back when I had a business in Raipur. And a nicer person you will never meet.
   
  I gave a demo of the web pages and swing client, and we found a bug in how plain text content is handled. Then I walked him through the GUI code and showed him how the displays were so simply composed using the XML from the  back end.
   
  But the nice thing was in talking about Rolonics. I illustrated it with two circles, one inside the other. Call it a cell, the inner circle being the nucleus of the cell. Then I attached the rolonic terms:
   
  The cell nucleus is the descriptor unit--it controls the behavior of the cell.
   
  The outer circle (the cell membrane) is the classifier unit--it controls the inter-relationships with other cells.
   
  The body of the cell is the ledger unit--it is the current state of the cell.
   
  Then the history of the cell is the journal unit--a listing of all the events which have affected the cell.
   
  Then a second picture. Its just a box subdivided into 4 equal parts, which are the Descriptor Unit, the Classifier Unit, the Ledger Unit and the Journal Unit. This is a rolon, or a first-class user object (call it a portlet if you want).
   
  Now the advantage of using a comprehensive theory like rolonics is that you can systematicly implement all the data and metadata of an object. There are really only 3 kinds of data elements--rolons, name/value pairs and a document.
   
  The Journal Unit is a list of all the transactions which affected the rolon--each transaction being another rolon.
   
  The Ledger Unit has LEnts (Ledger Entries) which are just name/value pairs. It has the documet, which is just a long string. And it has LSecs (Ledger sections), which are other rolons.
   
  The Classifier Unit has LEnts and CSecs, and there are some inverted tables to facilitate lookups. A large part of the Classifier Unit is implemented by the container (the Ark).
   
  The the Descriptor Unit of a rolon is a set of DEnts, as well as another rolon which is called the DescriptorUnit. Think of this other rolon as the class of the rolon, and it can have multiple instances. Also the LEnts of the descriptor unit are inherited as DEnts and the LSecs are inherited from this Descriptor Unit as DSects. One example of a DEnt is the MimeType, which describes the document in the Ledger Unit.
   
  And that, though its a bit much, describes the OODBMS of AgileWiki3. There are some complexities, but really not too much.
   
  Bill

				
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