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Hi! I'm one of the developers of Object Spreadsheets and will do my best to answer the substantive questions in this thread. Thanks to richardboegli for notif

Hi! I'm one of the developers of Object Spreadsheets and will do my best to answer the substantive questions in this thread. Thanks to richardboegli for notifying us.

dustingetz 10y ago
Can you handle multiple users with different security/permissions? Is it possible to gracefully grow an object spreadsheet into a real application, on scale of facebook.com, with performance and battery concerns along with a fully programmable UI? If not what is missing?
- mattmccutchen 10y ago
  > Can you handle multiple users with different security/permissions? Not yet. We obviously need this for real-world use, but we assumed it would be straightforward compared to the other features we've been working on, so it hasn't been a priority to actually implement it. > Is it possible to gracefully grow an object spreadsheet into a real application, on scale of facebook.com, with performance and battery concerns along with a fully programmable UI? If not what is missing? We haven't thought much about this so far; the small to medium applications are the lower hanging fruit for our approach. A few missing things I can think of: 1. We haven't put much work into performance, so the current implementation doesn't scale beyond small demos. It may be straightforward to move the execution to a relational DBMS, but it would take significant engineering (and maybe UI design) to make the spreadsheet UI useful for large data sets and complex schemas; there may be precedent in other tools. 2. Our language currently does not have the abstraction features one would want in order to write really complex business logic, e.g., object-oriented programming (or some alternative) and the ability to pass composite data types by value. If we wanted to support something like Facebook, our language might end up looking somewhat like that of object-relational DBMSes such as PostgreSQL, but with some differences for our data model.
mattmccutchen 10y ago
If you tried to access the public demo server with Google Chrome and got an error message, "Oops, looks like there's no route...", that should now be fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience. If anyone runs into further problems, please continue to email us at objsheets@mit.edu.
mattmccutchen 10y ago
Thanks for the thoughtful questions (even if the answer to many of them was "not yet"!). It looks like most people are done here, so I'm no longer watching the thread. If you'd like a response from us, please email objsheets@mit.edu.

Hi! I'm one of the developers of Object Spreadsheets and will do my best to answer the substantive questions in this thread. Thanks to richardboegli for notifying us.

dustingetz 10y ago

Can you handle multiple users with different security/permissions? Is it possible to gracefully grow an object spreadsheet into a real application, on scale of facebook.com, with performance and battery concerns along with a fully programmable UI? If not what is missing?

mattmccutchen 10y ago
> Can you handle multiple users with different security/permissions? Not yet. We obviously need this for real-world use, but we assumed it would be straightforward compared to the other features we've been working on, so it hasn't been a priority to actually implement it. > Is it possible to gracefully grow an object spreadsheet into a real application, on scale of facebook.com, with performance and battery concerns along with a fully programmable UI? If not what is missing? We haven't thought much about this so far; the small to medium applications are the lower hanging fruit for our approach. A few missing things I can think of: 1. We haven't put much work into performance, so the current implementation doesn't scale beyond small demos. It may be straightforward to move the execution to a relational DBMS, but it would take significant engineering (and maybe UI design) to make the spreadsheet UI useful for large data sets and complex schemas; there may be precedent in other tools. 2. Our language currently does not have the abstraction features one would want in order to write really complex business logic, e.g., object-oriented programming (or some alternative) and the ability to pass composite data types by value. If we wanted to support something like Facebook, our language might end up looking somewhat like that of object-relational DBMSes such as PostgreSQL, but with some differences for our data model.

mattmccutchen 10y ago

If you tried to access the public demo server with Google Chrome and got an error message, "Oops, looks like there's no route...", that should now be fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience. If anyone runs into further problems, please continue to email us at objsheets@mit.edu.

mattmccutchen 10y ago

Thanks for the thoughtful questions (even if the answer to many of them was "not yet"!). It looks like most people are done here, so I'm no longer watching the thread. If you'd like a response from us, please email objsheets@mit.edu.