Alagic Sets Stage for Future Virtual Platforms on ODBMS.ORG

ODBMS.ORG, the Internet's most up-to-date educational and research portal on object database technology, has published a paper by expert panel member Suad Alagic on the "Next Generation of Virtual Platforms", demonstrating that object oriented persistence should be better addressed in the design of virtual machines.

The paper, which is available for free download from ODBMS.ORG's expert section, adresses three major, controversial issues critical for the next generation of virtual platforms for object-oriented languages. The first one is providing explicit support for parametric types in the virtual machine. The second is that object-oriented languages (of the next generation) equipped with assertions and running on virtual platforms require proper support for parametric types equipped with assertions (constraints). The third is the need for much more sophisticated orthogonal persistent capabilities.

"I'm very happy about this newest contribution, as it shows that the ODBMS.ORG portal on object database technology has found a firm place as an outlet for cutting-edge research on object-oriented persistence," says Prof. Roberto Zicari, editor of ODBMS.ORG.

Alagic's paper is available along with contributions from luminaries including Scott Ambler, William Cook, Carl Rosenberger and Michael Blaha.

In additon, ODBMS.ORG has seen new contributions to the general download section, such as Lancaster University work on aspect-oriented databases (Awais Rashid), the ObjectManager software packages for Objectivity/DB and db4o, Donghui Zhang's "The Northeastern University Storage Package" (a tool to create persistent data structures), and Chris Smith's lecture on Java and Databases.

ODBMS.ORG also welcomes six new panel members:

• Dr. Julian Bunn, Caltech
• Dr. Barbara Catania, University of Genova
• Tom Jell, Siemens
• Dr. Awais Rashid, Lancaster University
• Dr. Jaideep Srivastava, CTO Persistent Systems
• Prof. Dr. Elena Ferrari, University of Insubria, Como

To improve community communication, ODBMS.ORG now has a Forum, hosted by sponsor db4objects, which is a resource to browse recent announcements on object database technology. Users can share their thoughts with the editor and other members of the research community. The forum also supports an RSS feed that allows readers to stay up-to-date about recent changes and discussions on ODBMS.ORG.

Contact ODBMS.ORG at editor@odbms.org