Developers in the RSSOwl team were feeling pressure from the competition. Facing a total rewrite of their RSS/RDF/Atom news reader, the team implemented db4o.

According to Benjamin Pasero, who heads the RSSOwl development team, users wanted to be able to store news locally and they wanted better search capabilities. They also demanded automatic software updates and the ability to add their own features. ‟In summer 2005, it became clear to us that it was going to be very hard to catch up with the features of other readers without redesigning everything. We started working on RSSOwl 2.0 from scratch.”

Aside from making the newsreader faster, easier to use and customizable, the team also wanted to keep expansion simple. ‟If other developers are interested in extending RSSOwl with more functionality, we wanted them to be able to use our persistence solution without having to learn a new language.”
Implementing a relational database would require application model extensions and likely require complex schema evolutions through a separate DDL. When using db4o, the application model and the database schema are the same, so application extensions naturally extend to the database schema without unnecessary complication. ‟From our experiments with other persistence solutions, db4o was definitely the one where we had a prototype up and running in the shortest time.”

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