The latest release of the Elephant persistent object store is now available. It is numbered 0.6.0. It may be obtained from the project page either as a downloaded tgz file, or you make access it via anonymous CVS.

http://common-lisp.net/project/elephant/

Ian Eslick made most of the code contributions to this release, which features a very elegant method of indexing the slots of a persistent class. For developers, the internals of Elephant were also significantly refactored by Ian. Additionally, a layer of data management on top of Elephant that implements a Director-like pattern called Data Collection Management has been added to the contrib directory.

In addition to personally thanking Ian, I would like to say that I personally think Elephant has grown into an extraordinarily useful project. Let me just review the major advantages of Elephant as a persistent object store:

1) Extraordinarily convenient for the programmer, 2) An extensive test suite, 3) Tested on several major LISP implementations (ACL, SBCL, OpenMCL), 4) Ability to use multiple back-end data repositories and to migrate whole data stores seamlessly between those repositories, 5) Ability to BerkeleyDB, PostGres, SQLite 3, and probably other back- end databases, 6) Extremely convenient slot and functional indexing that can be dynamically changed.

The overall effect of these features together is that Elephant is very flexible for serious application development: you can change fundamental implementation decisions easily as your application evolves.

---- Robert L. Read, PhD read &T robertlread.net Consider visiting Progressive Engineering: http://robertlread.net/pe In Austin: 912-8593 "Think globally, Act locally." -- RBF