New Weblog Software on the Block
“Syncato”:http://www.syncato.org/ is a new and *very* interesting piece of weblog software.
It uses Berkeley DB for the backend—which I think is a very good choice as long as care is taken with signal handling etc., so as to close databases properly when shutting down. Many of the problems I’ve seen with BDB have come from old environments being left behind after a crash and being reused—so I hope this code cleans the environment when starting up as well. Does it use a transactional environment?
What else? A REST-based API, as one would expect. XQuery-enabled, thanks to using the Berkeley XML DB add-on. Written in Python, so in theory it should be easy to modify and extend.
Difficult to install, perhaps, though Rick Bradley has written an “install script”:http://www.rickbradley.com/code/syncatomatic/
A question on the side: why don’t more people use Berkeley DB? Okay it doesn’t have a “real” SQL language, but it is extremely fast, and far more capable than I suspect people are aware of.
+A correction, before somebody points out the obvious, this is a general framework for editing and accessing XML fragments, which _just happens_ to find a use as a weblog-enabling tool.+
September 30th, 2003 at 6:22 pm
Good question. I suppose that, for anyone that did a classical CS course, the concepts “DB” and “SQL” are inextricably linked. Which is a pity, because mySQL is not thorough enough as an SQL implementation that it has a huge advantage over Berkeley DB.