In the early and mid 1990's, a paradigm shift occured from procedual programming to Object Oriented (OO) programming. It became obvious that this was the evolutionary parth for M as it was for other older computer languages. We had to evolve M to a modern, Object Oriented, language that would retain its strenghths:
At the same time, add all the benefits of the OO paradigm:
Today, numerous database products have evolved based on the associative array (Name/Value) data structure that is fundamental to M and, consequently, EsiObjects. Google has developed BigTable, Amazon developed SimpleDB, and IBM bought CouchDB. etc. These "schemaless" or "schemafree" databases evolved in response to Cloud Computing's demands for fast retrieval, easy development and simple queries. Relational and SQL Technology is not making in this high demand environment. With the evolution of XML and related technologies (Javascript, Ajax, JSON, etc) and the Web , there is clearly a new demand for an OO data storage system that can meet the needs cloud computing.
The EsiObjects project is part of a virtual umbrella organization called Out-of-the-Slipstream (or simply Slipstream). This is the organization's mission statement:
"Through advocacy, collaboration and education, Out-of-the-Slipstream promotes technologies that implement and support schemafree database solutions for innovative needs such as large-scale databases and cloud computing. We are committed to providing a nurturing environment that stimulates and encourages the use of these technologies to meet new and innovative challenges."
Slipstream will emulate the Apache Foundation where possible. Slipstream will be an unbrella organization for multiple M based projects. Currently, in addition to the EsiObjects project, there are several other projects underway:
Anyone can add a project that is M based. Additionally a Google Group has been set up for discussions. At the technical level, we are using assembla as our project management environment.
Thank you for your interest!