<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Carol, I see sharing the catalog as a read-only thing.  I don't know what Aleksey has in mind for Library.   Even if that wasn't true, a database is not necessary.  There is a framework called Prevayler that handles in-memory databases in such a way that you can lose power without losing updates.  I've used that framework in Java and I believe there is an implementation for Python as well.  I doubt I would need it though. I think of this as being an electronic card catalog for one's personal library.  I'm not doing airline reservations, or dealing with more data than will easily fit in memory.  If someone's battery dies while they're adding cards to the catalog they'll lose their work but the old directory entry should survive. As a user I would not want to need external software to make my Activity work.  I have experienced this with Read Etexts and the speech function.  Read Etexts has supported TTS with highlighting for months, but getting the needed external (outside the Activity bundle) software on everyone's XO is a whole other problem, that will take a lot longer to solve.  If there was a way to avoid that I would have. James Simmons Carol Farlow Lerche wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:c856d2f0905041248y7d79ee53qbd5fc50d967adf75@mail.gmail.com" type="cite">You would need to reinvent ACID updates if you shared the catalog. <div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 12:34 PM, James Simmons <<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:jim.simmons@walgreens.com">jim.simmons@walgreens.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Carol, I would not use sqllite 3.  The metadata for several hundred books could easily fit in memory.  It would basically be a good sized spreadsheet.  Python has a "pickling" feature which can save a bunch of objects in memory in a single file that can be easily reloaded into memory.  I could store the pickle file as a Journal entry.  I would not try to recreate ALL of Calibre, just the parts I would find the most useful.  That way the Activity could be entirely self contained. James Simmons <div> <div class="h5"> Carol Farlow Lerche wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Calibre makes a sqlite3 database which is the basis for its display.  It seems to have a reasonable schema.  (An easy way to examine it is with the Sqlite Manger, an excellent Firefox add-on if you haven't already discovered it). </blockquote> </div> </div> </blockquote> </div> </blockquote> </body> </html>