From: RE

To: Editor

Date: 26 Mar 2004

 

 

Recently I found the online magazine Journal of Object Technology on the web page www.jot.fm. There are perhaps two interesting articles for you.

 

Perhaps you are interested in the fact, that in an article your MANIFESTO is being quoted as the Answer of "the DBMS vendors" to objects and content and also offers a kind of "summary of the book". The overall idea of this article is that there are to many different ways that information are stored, retrieved, manipulated, searched and so we need to bring the databases and the programming languages closer together. Unfortunately it has nothing to say about your Tutorial D suggestion.

 

Minimal Affordances for Objects and Content

In order to accommodate the increasing demand for objects and content, the DBMS vendors replied with the Third Generation Database Manifesto. In particular they added new native types to the database to support objects (called user defined data types) and large text types. Both of these extended types were syntactic extensions on Blobs, which were added largely to support images, and documents. SQL was extended to allow query operations over BLOBS using special content selector objects. Recently text types have been enhanced to support XML schemas or DTDs.

 

As a second suggestion I found on this webpage the book review of the second edition of one of your "favorite books" for debunking: BASIC CONCEPTS IN UML: A REQUEST FOR CLARIFICATION. Now it is called: THE OBJECT CONSTRAINT LANGUAGE SECOND EDITION, GETTING YOUR MODELS READY FOR MDA. Here is the way this text starts:

 

As a mathematician, I have always been drawn to the more formal programming methods of the Object Constraint Language (OCL). With it, you can place precise mathematical descriptions of what must be true before the code executes and what is guaranteed to be true after the code has run. Given the concise nature of mathematical notation, the OCL expressions also can replace many times their text in comments.

 

The book now seems to concentrate on MDA:

 

An MDA is a high level framework that describes how models can be translated from language to language. Since the purpose is to allow for the translation to be done by machine, it is necessary for all restrictions to be written in a clear, unambiguous manner.

         

Perhaps this is a chance to "revisit this debunking" and find out whether there was some clarification and see whether something has changed (I hope this is not a stupid suggestion.)

 

 

C. J. Date Responds: I have the briefest of responses, I’m afraid.

 

1. Now I’ve seen the Thomas paper myself. It’s dreadful, isn’t it? I don’t know if I even want to take the time to respond to it (but I might).

 

2. I have no desire to deal with anything to do with OCL ever again, thank you very much. The problems with it that I described in my article Basic Concepts in UML: A Request for Clarification—Part 1: The OCL Book are much too fundamental for them to be fixable by some new “edition”.

 

 

 

Posted 05/14/04