7/27/2019 Db4o Success Story - RSSOwl

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7/27/2019 Db4o Success Story - RSSOwl

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bedded database was really hard withplain HSQLDB and H2. We wanted aconsistent programming model that waseasy-to-use and understand.

Things got a little easier, he said, whenthey added Oracle Toplink JPA Essen-tials, which layers the Java Persistence

API on top. But it was not very easy tolearn. They looked at Oracles Berke-ley DB Java Edition, but did nothing se-rious with it, and soon began to realizethat a relational database might not bethe way to go.

RSSOwl heavily relies on ne-grainedevents being sent out from databaseoperations. Having to use a relationaldatabase seemed to make this par-ticular need very hard to implementbecause a SQL command would haveto be developed, stored and called upfor each event, resulting in unnecessarycomplexity and serious loss of applica-tion performance, Pasero said.

db4o was straight forward

The advantage of db4o over theRDBMS was that db4o provides easy-to-use event mechanisms that aretriggered along with changes to data-base entities, he explained. db4o wasstraight forward, closer to the object

oriented programming model and faster in terms of performance.

There was another consequence of adding the relational hierarchy; growingresource demands, both in the size of the executable le and the memory re -quired to run it. We found that with somany layers, the memory footprint while

Case Study | RSSOwl | Information Management

RSSOwl Highlights

RSS / RDF / Atom Newsreader

Downloads > 500 per Day> 1,000,000 in total

Open Source /Platform Independent

Initial Development:Summer 2005 for version 2.0,Summer 2003 for version 1.0

Latest Release:2.0 in October 2009(after 9 Milestone Releases)

Database features

db4o by Versant

Easy-to-use APIObject-orientedSmall footprint

Versant Corp.Corporate Headquarters255 Shoreline Drive, Suite 450,Redwood City, CA 94065Ph +1 650-232-2400,Fx +1 650-232-2401http://www.versant.com

http://www.rssowl.org

using the database was quite [large],and added quite a bit to the size of theapplication. Both of those problemsdisappeared when db4o came into thepicture. The object database alsoallowed them to avoid SQL.

We really didnt want to pollute our code with SQL statements. We have anobject-oriented programming back-ground, so being able to use this know-ledge with a database is just perfect for us. It was one of the main reasons for favoring db4o against others; none of which satis ed our needs and goals for an embedded database.

db4o and Eclipse

Db4o also leverages the Eclipse valueproposition. By integrating with theEclipse Rich Client Platform framework,Pasero was able to use Eclipse mecha-nisms for adding automatic softwareupdates and interface extension buil-ding to his software. Kudos to the db4oteam. We where really happy to nd outthat open source projects can integratedb4o without extra cost. Moreover,integration with Apaches Java-basedLucene full-text search engine broughtadvanced search features, and newsarticles are, of course, stored in db4o.

According to Pasero, the RSSOwl tool

received SourceForges Project of theMonth award in Jan., 2005, and hasbeen downloaded more than a milliontimes.

Available as open source, RSSOwl 2.0is based on Java 5 (instead of 1.4.2, aswas 1.x) and SWT, can be downloaded

now at http://www.rssowl.org.

RSSOwl - a news aggre-gator for RSS and AtomNews feeds.

RSSOwl is released underthe Eclipse Public Licenseand written in Java, usingdb4o by Versant for datastorage.

RSSOwl is free softwareand available for every-body.