[OJB-developers] problems with OJB

[Matthew B. <ma...@so...>]

I'm sending this specifically to you two guys because you are the most
active developers for the core of OJB.

We have big problems with objects being updated and cache consistency.

If you load an object in one VM, serialize it to another VM, then update
fields and send it back and call store(x), you will end up with objects
referencing that object becoming stale.

ie

FOO references BAR

load BAR (VM1)
serialize BAR to VM2 set some attributes
serialize BAR back to VM1 for update
load FOO, now the FOO refers to the old BAR, not the updated BAR.

I'm looking at what it will take to fix this now, but I wanted you two big
brains to start thinking about it as well. This is a subtle bug (in some
cases) that is hard to write test cases for. I'm seeing it because we seem
to be the major users of OJB in J2EE where it's location transparency. the
JDO API built on top of the PB will never really be right until this works.
Luckily this is all encapsulated inside the PB.

I'm trying to come up with a more unified view of how getting objects and
updating objects from the PB might work. It might be a smart thing to expose
"read" and "write" get operations on the PB. I'm not sure right now.

thoughts?
m