[Gardeners] Persistent Store gardening projects

[Ian Eslick]

There has been some recent action in the Persistent Object Store space.  
Following the release of
AllegroCache, Franz's commercial objects store, there are two active 
open source projects that
provide substantially similar functionality.  A new version of Elephant 
v0.6 was just released
which works on SBCL, CMUCL, Allegro and OpenMCL and  should work under 
Lispworks
and an alpha version of Rucksack (by Arthur Lemmons) which currently is 
partially functional
on LispWorks but has all of the critical of the features coded.

Both systems provide:
- Persistent metaobjects w/ indexing options on slots and instances
- Persistent indexes (Btrees or classes)
- Broad serialization of standard lisp objects (no functions/closures, 
structs, packages, however)
- ACID properties (using Transactions, locking, rollback, etc)

Elephant is ready for broad use, Rucksack is probably 6 months or so 
away assuming Arthur can
put the time in or gets some help debugging/porting and tuning.  A more 
detailed comparison of
the two systems can be found here: http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060604.html

Elephant could certainly use some gardening help!
- Reviewing documentation
- A noobie guide
- Providing some more code examples of how one might use a PODB
- Suggesting new features that would be helpful to newcomers
- Better installation instructions (esp. dealing with BDB, FFI, etc for 
various platforms)

I'd be happy to support people who are interested in this.