This explores the idea of replacing a traditional relational database with a raft replicated arbitrary metadata store.
You don’t need an ORM if everything is an object already!
This is very much in sync with the exploratory programming ideas.
I’ve decided to explore this idea in Elixir due to two reasons:
- Everything in elixir is serializable, everything is immutable by default, you can take any object and send it over the wire, including functions.
- Availability of a high quality, robust Raft library with on-disk persistance backed by a WAL -> Ra library [archive] .
The idea is to be able to just write data structures and freely replicate them over a cluster of nodes, even if it’s only one node. And persist them into disk safely.
This allows you to build Elixir applications WITHOUT a database.
This follows a bit on the ideas of
this post [archive] 
[HN archive] .
Everyone there thought it was a dumb idea, but I like it and I think it’s nice to test the boundaries of what is now considered best practices. Since most of the foundational work is done by the Ra library I can focus on the ergonomics of working with an object distributed database.
The name means box in japanese.
TO BE CONTINUED!