Hi,
slightly over a year ago, we set out on a course to investigate what content applications would encounter in this new era where data has moved from a liability and cost to an opportunity - if you have the infrastructure to scale. We looked at the architecture of our own content management product, to that of competitors, and decided to move ahead of the curve and design and build the first NoSQL-based content repository that provides cloud-scalable content storage and search.
Lily is the result of that effort, and its "Proof of Architecture" release is available today from www.lilycms.org - licensed under the liberal Apache open source license.
Lily fuses Apache HBase, the Google BigTable-inspired NoSQL column-oriented database, and SOLR, the industry-standard search engine running on top of Apache Lucene, and provides infinitely scalable storage and search for large content collections.
The Lily content repository offers a rich and flexible content model, with strong versioning support, and a queue system that keeps SOLR indexes up to date with repository updates. The Lily content model has been academically validated and accommodates data mapped from various domains, such as rich hypermedia, HTML5, NewsML, MXF, CMIS, RDF and many more.
This Proof of Architecture release is made specifically for the audience Lily has been designed for: content technologists, developers of content applications such as WCMS, CMS, DAM, DMS and RM, which are being confronted with the lack of scale and reliability a relational DBMS back-end often exhibits when data and usage volumes explode. Lily has been specifically architected to be fully distributable, allowing it to run on large server farms or in the cloud, making use of such large-scale infrastructure to provide room for growth.
Outerthought, the company behind Lily, has been building and nurturing open source content management technology for more than 6 years now, and has been leveraging this experience throughout the Lily design. We were first in realizing that NoSQL could be a tremendous asset for content application builders, and to make use of these new and exciting concepts and technology in designing and building a fully-integrated content repository solution.
With this Proof of Architecture, we invite content technologists to check Lily out, and to consider not building their own NoSQL content repository in the years to come, but rather to join us in a open software community around Lily and focus on front-end and UI differentiators instead.
A first Lily distribution release is planned for November 2010, and Lily 1.0 will be there March 2011. We're recruiting technology partners as we speak.
Lily is made available from www.lilycms.org starting now. Follow us on Twitter @outerthought to be updated as we proceed. There's a FAQ on Lily available as well: http://www.lilycms.org/lily/about/faq.html.
I'd especially like to thank the HBase community for their effort in accommodating us, the SOLR/Lucene community for their great software, Michael Stack and Lars George for their enthusiasm along the way, and Bruno and Evert, our lead Lily engineers, for the past year of hard work.
I'm thrilled to see where we are at now, and invite anyone to join us in this excitement.
Thanks for your attention,
Steven.