Comments on: Why choose Elephant?

By: Leslie

Leslie — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 20:55:00 +0000

Ah, thanks for the clarification. All the worse then for Franz ;)

By: Mitch

Mitch — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 17:20:32 +0000

The pricing of the Franz offerings is not that easily discoverable on their site. The academic license for $599 precludes the deployment of an application.

I thought that the cost of ACL and the ability to deploy applications produced using it were on the order of a few thousand dollars with a negotiable amount to be paid based on the deployment.

LW is $1300 and you can deliver applications with it.

By: Leslie

Leslie — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 09:35:32 +0000

Comparing

http://www.lispworks.com/buy/prices-1c.html
http://www.franz.com/products/packages/

shows ACL starting at 599 USD and LW at 1300 USD (for one platform!).

Did you mean something else?

By: Mitch

Mitch — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 03:49:41 +0000

I think you have the affordability of LW vs. ACL reversed.

By: Leslie

Leslie — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:07:08 +0000

Berkeley DB is not a client-server database like MySQL or PostgreSQL, it’s more like SQLite. The only thing you could do (although I imagine a host of problems) would be mounting the database files remotely. But this doesn’t really distribute any load.

By: Victor Kryukov

Victor Kryukov — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 02:56:11 +0000

Hey Leslie,

very interesting post, thank you. Can you please explain your statement that “BDB is not a distributed solution”?

Victor.

By: Leslie

Leslie — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:57:59 +0000

I didn’t mean to say that I won’t talk about LW and ACL, but their solutions for object persistency.

Franz’s solution for OP is called AllegroCache and, to my knowledge, requires ACL. I have the impression that it’s an excellent solution, but I can’t afford to buy ACL right now. Plus, I have grown accustomed to SBCL.

I can’t find LispWorks’ solution for OP right now, but I dimly remember having read about it in the near past. Well, if they have one, it isn’t portable either, or chances are I would have noticed it. LW is even less affordable than ACL.

As for the “open source” argument: it’s very important to me to have access to the source code. AllegroCache might actually be open source, I don’t know.

No, I’m not planning to change my persistency layer. But changing backends is something I anticipate, since BDB is not a distributed solution.

Feel free to ask more questions.

Leslie

By: Grant Rettke

Grant Rettke — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:44:49 +0000

From what you said you aren’t considering LispWorks or AllegroCommonLisp because they are not free or portable. I’m trying to understand what you mean by this.

Are you planning on changing your persistence layer at some point?

Are you concerned about the price of the tools or the fact that they are not open source?