My new Powershell project

Ok, here’s what I’m going to do… Before I had written a compiler for my own query language that is designed to do object persistence on an associative database… I have found now that it would be nice if I could write full fledged ’stored procedures’ and shell scripts that would allow me to encapsulate all of my data code entirely within the realm of a script, including all of the turing complete features of a programing language, like looping constructs, if statements, block level variable scoping etc. As a result, I had first considered implementing a full language from the bootstraps, but instead, I’ve decided that since the Data access business is what I really need, then I’m just going to extend an existing one. I’ve looked at IronPython, and Ruby.CLR, both of which are good candidates, but they are totally different syntactically from anything C based, so I’ve decided to go with something of the C language lineage. Enter Powershell. Powershell is great here, it’s dynamic typed, it allows me to use multiple hash structures to represent object graphs, and it allows me to write new commands that integrate directly into scripts without being first ‘reparsed’ by something else.

I want to do object persistence, and the majority of my objects aren’t two dimensional, and I don’t like ORMapping to represent them, because it’s a ton of unnecessary overhead, and really it will have to flatten, and unflatten them — for what?! ORMapping is for relational data anyway, and this is Associative data, which is natively n-dimensional, and can represent graph structures without requiring silly things like JOINs… so I’m going to go all out on JSON, which also can represent graph structures in its normal format. I will have to either a) find a JSON parser for powershell, or B) write one. I may be able to use the stuff from the new asp.net ajax framework fed into a cmdlet but maybe not… we’ll see about that one. I might be able to use Newtonsoft, and possibly Jayrock, but neither one works exactly how I’d like, for example in the way they handle date parsing, and neither is aware of the structure of existing objects. I’m pretty sure that the ASP.NET ajax JavascriptSerializer IS aware of objects in real life, so I’m hoping all I have to do is wrap that up as a component.

Wish me luck?