NeXTSTEP objects (was: Re: I'll help with db debugging)

On Thu, Apr 05, 2001 at 02:16:19PM -0400, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>...
> For what it's worth, in the days of NeXTSTEP, objects were
> stored in things called "NIBs". These were binary files for
> efficiency reasons, but I have the impression that many
> developers felt they would have been better as plain-text
> files of some format.

Damn straight they would have been nice in plain text. While you're working
on the code, it would be nice to see what the heck got serialized for your
object. While you object changes during development, etc, you want to
inspect those things, tweak them, whatever.

Let's not mix apples and oranges, though. We've got our data serialized in a
*text* format, but stored into a database where the metadata happens to be
binary. We have the flexibility of text and the data structures are quite
flexible/adaptable (meaning we can easily and backwards-compatibly change
the structure that is serialized). Further, our use case and application is
a bit different than NeXTTEP objects.

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/