[nickyp]

For those who want to take this kind of approach (object prevalence) in Common Lisp see http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-prevalence/

Sven Van Caekenberghe (the author of cl-prevalence) and I used this approach to power the back-end/cms of a concert hall back in 2003. A write-up of our experiences can be found at http://homepage.mac.com/svc/RebelWithACause/index.html

The combination of a long-running Lisp image with a remote REPL and the flexibility of the object prevalence made it a very enjoyable software development cycle. It's possibly even more applicable with the current memory prices.

I especially liked the fact that your mind never needs to step out of your object space. No fancy mapping or relationship tables, just query the objects and their relations directly. I guess that's what SmallTalk developers also like about their programming environment.

[larve]

we started with cl-prevalence and then of course (NIH-syndrome) implemented our own approach to this back in 2003, which you can find at http://bknr.net/ . We used it back then to run eboy.com, and it still is powering http://quickhoney.com http://www.createrainforest.org/ and http://ruinwesen.com/ amongst others. Those transaction logs + images are for some 6+ years old, and have gone through multiple code rewrites and compiler changes and OS changes and what not. It is good fun, has drawbacks, has advantages, definitely widens your horizon.

[alokt_]

yes, smalltalk users can just image persistence or sandstone from Ramon Leon.

http://book.seaside.st/book/advanced/persistency/sandstone