Managing Permanent Objects

Abstract
This work describes a programming system that facilitates the management of data objects that live across multiple invocations of programs that read and modify those objects; we call such data objects permanent objects. Typically, programmers needing to save data objects permanently do so either (1) by writing an ad hoc set of procedures that convert their data from some internal representation to some external representation (and back), or (2) by interfacing their programs with an existing database system. We discuss the problems encountered by a programmer adopting either of these strategies, and we describe our system whose design is an attempt to strike a balance between the flexibility of the ad hoc approach and the rigidity of the approach that employs a database. A key goal of our work is the design and implementation of a system that makes the manipulation of permanent objects nearly as easy and flexible as the manipulation of 'transient' objects - i.e. the memory resident data structures that programmers are accustomed to dealing with. We wish to hide the details associated with the fact that permanent objects must have their permanent home in a disk file system.

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