So the whole reason I even started writing Sheeple was to use it as a persistent object backend for Sykosomatic, that MUD that I’ve been sort-of writing since I started working on Lisp, but is still unfinished.
Sheeple is a very dynamic system, and so when I went looking for a database backend to build this persistence library around, most things fell short of my expectations… and then I found CouchDB.
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Adlai said we should make an emergency release of Sheeple, since he added effective reply function caching. I agreed. If you do -any- sort of semi-serious data crunching using Sheeple, stay the hell away from 3.0.2!
It’s taken a while to get this release out — we kept adding stuff on — but it’s finally out. Even though it’s a minor version bump, there’s some important API changes with this new version, including the complete removal of ADD-PROPERTY. Originally, I thought it would be a good idea to force users to add a property manually before being allowed to set a value. Then I realized that the Python community has had this ability for a very long time. The freenode Pythonistas seemed to pretty consistently agree that it had never caused serious problems. Thus, A-P is gone, and (SETF PROPERTY-VALUE) is now used to both add a property, and to set a value on existing ones.
There is also now a manual! A pretty one in both PDF and HTML form, which can be found at our new project page on common-lisp.net. There’s also some mailing lists on that page you might want to sign up for if you feel like tracking Sheeple development.
Things have slowly been ramping up. Ever since I gave that talk at the TC Lispers meeting, a few other people have given Sheeple a whirl. I’m pleased that their experiences have been good, even though Sheeple is still a bit unstable. Of particular note is Patrick Stein’s Wooly, a GL-based GUI toolkit using Sheeple objects.
Development has slowed down a bit since I started working at Clockwork, but I’ve been working with Adlai lately towards a native-Sheeple MOP. So far, the basics of object creation have been taken care of, and a property MOP should be up and running soon. We’ve also decided to rename persistent-sheeple, but that will get announced once we have enough of a MOP to hook up our objects to CouchDB.