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| NSPPLs can store NSDictionaries and NSArrays. NSDictionaries provide fast key-value lookup, but don't allow sequential access in any kind of sorted order. NSArrays can provide sequential access. I decided to use an NSPPL to implement an IXStoreFile, an NSDictionary to implement an IXStoreDirectory, and both an NSDictionary and an NSArray to implement an IXBTree. IXStore is "a transaction based, compacting storage allocator designed for data-intensive applications." and IXStoreFile puts the storage on disk. For a temporary backend, I decided to forego transactions and compacting and concurrency control and just implement the calls my client code used: the transaction calls from IXStore and the initialization methods from IXStoreFile. Even though I didn't plan to implement transactions, I didn't want to remove the transaction-oriented code from DataPhile, so the methods needed to be there. IXStoreDirectory and IXBTree conform to the IXBlockAndStore protocols, which use the notion of a handle to a block of storage. Because of this, I kept the idea of block numbers allocated by IXStore, but eliminated the idea of blocks as constant-sized storage units (meaning that something stored in an IXStore might extend over multiple blocks). Instead, each IXStore client would be assigned a block number which would provide access to that client's storage. So in IXStore and IXStoreFile, I needed to map block numbers to data. Since an NSPPL incorporates an NSDictionary to provide access to its storage, I decided to use that dictionary to store block number / data pairs. |