GLORP (Generalized Lightweight Object-Relational Persistence) is an object-to-relational-database mapping layer for Smalltalk. GLORP is an open source project (see http://sourceforge.net/projects/glorp/ for details) whose code has been made available for a number of dialects of Smalltalk.GLORP can be used with a number of relational databases including DB2 and Oracle. It also supports the ODBC database interface.

The examples in this tutorial were run using VA Smalltalk V8.0.2, GLORP 0.3.178, and Oracle 11g ODBC.

Relational databases are often used for persistence of data for programs. Whereas Smalltalk code consists of interacting objects, relational databases consist of tables of data, tables which are often normalized. The goal of GLORP is to make the use of relational databases in Smalltalk as transparent as possible.

Many of the concepts used by GLORP are discussed in Martin Fowler’s book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture published by Addison-Wesley in 2003. For those that wish to learn more about object-to-relational mappings references to relevant sections of the book are given in this tutorial.