Blog Archive

During a conference call last week, I got a request for a high-level description of the differentiators between Lily and its underlying components: what sets Lily apart against HBase basically. Here's a rough take at it before I fold it into the product documentation: your comments are appreciat...

With all the noise going to Lily these days, lest not forget our continuing development of Daisy and Kauri, the former an inspiration for the content model behind Lily, the latter providing the runtime environment. Daisy and Kauri both saw a release candidate in the past few weeks, to which you'...

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 pr...

I just stumbled upon (gee, another HBase user) the video of my talk on some of the technology decisions we made during Lily's design phase. You'll have to live with my lack of tempo during the first 10 minutes, and you don't have to take my word for everything I say: on July 22nd, we're opening...

HBase, like BigTable, “is a sparse, distributed, persistent multidimensional sorted map. The map is indexed by a row key, column key, and a timestamp; each value in the map is an uninterpreted array of bytes.” (ref) For completeness, we could consider "table" and "column family" as other dimensi...

When parsing a JSON file, or an XML file for that matter, you have two options. You can read the file entirely in an in-memory data structure (a tree model), which allows for easy random access to all the data. Or you can process the file in a streaming manner. In this case, either the parser ca...

In a recent keynote at SOCC, Jeff Dean of Google listed a number of design patterns for system design and a number of challenges for the future. I wrote them down, and thought I might as well share them. You can find the presentation here (it begins with something else, just skip forward a few s...

This week I attended a workshop organized by the IKS research project in Salzburg. To use the description from their website, IKS “will provide an open source technology platform for semantically enhanced content management systems.” Semantic technology includes a lot of aspects: smart algorith...

We're currently on the lookout for a Senior Software Engineer well versed in the worlds of Java, Javascript and RESTful thinking. Spread the word, or consider applying!

HBase provides atomic row-level updates. This is one of the important reasons why we choose HBase as the underlying store for our upcoming Lily open source content repository, as consistency is very important for users trusting their data onto our software. Next, we needed some way to rapidly lo...