So I’ve been fiddling quite a bit with neo4j for an idea I had. I can say I definitely like how fast and intuitive it is to use. I’m a bit worried about storage. I created 1000 nodes with 100 relationships each and my database folder ballooned to 250 megs. That isn’t huge, but it is quite a bit larger than I expected. I’m new to the framework, so I may have done something wrong in that test.
Qi4j is a new framework I’ve been looking at. As my friend Nick put it, “it’s mixins for Java!” which is, well, true; but here’s the description from the site:
Qi4j is a framework for domain centric application development, including evolved concepts from AOP, DI and DDD.
Qi4j is an implementation of Composite Oriented Programming, using the standard Java 5 platform, without the use of any pre-processors or new language elements. Everything you know from Java 5 still applies and you can leverage both your experience and toolkits to become more productive with Composite Oriented Programming today.
Next question is “what is composite oriented programming” right?
Many objects has life cycles that are more extensive than the simple model that Object Oriented Programming model wants us to believe. A few simple examples;
- An egg becomes a chicken which in turn becomes food.
- I am a programmer at work, a father+husband at home, a victim in a traffic accident and hunter and pray in the jungle.
But it is more to it than that. The composition of the object may change over time. My home now has a garage and my car have different kind of problems with their own state related to it.
In the programming world, we are constantly faced with change of requirements. These changes are often not related to any real world changes, but people coming to new insights of the problem domain. OOP makes those changes a big deal, and often we have to tear up large chunks of the model and redo the work.But wait, there is more.
Some objects traverses different scope boundaries to the extreme. For instance, a Person will have its attributes changing slightly over time, new abilities be learnt and so forth, that is mentioned above. But the Person will eventually die, but that doesn’t mean that the Person object should be deleted from a system, since the “memory of” that Person may live on for a long time. In a OOP system, we would need to transfer some of the state from a LivingPerson class to a DeadPerson class. In Composite Oriented Programming, it is the same object with different behavior.
We think that one of the the main flaws in OOP is that it is not object oriented at all, but in fact class oriented. Class is the first class citizen that objects are derived from. Not objects being the first-class citizen to which one or many classes are assigned.
I can’t wait to play with this, but I have not yet had time… 