Designing and Implementing an Ada Language Binding Specification for ODMG-93

摘要

Object-oriented database management systems (ODBMSs) represent the latestadvancement in database technology, combining the reusability and maintainability of the object-oriented programming paradigm with the ability to efficiently store and retrieve a wide range of data types as well as code to manipulate stored data. Unfortunately, programmers developing software in the Ada programming language do not have the ability to interface to object databases without significant customized code development. One important reason for this has been the absence of a standard defining the constructs accessing ODBMS functionality. This thesis documents the creation of an Ada language binding to the ODMG-93 standard for object database interfaces. Key portions of the binding are then implemented for the Itasca and ObjectStore ODBMSs written in Lisp and C, respectively. This work achieved the goals of a complete, portable, and transparent object database interface for Ada. To satisfy transparency a preprocessor was assumed to exist for both implementations, and its degree of involvement was directly proportional to the degree of strong typing of the ODBMS implementation language.