A content repository for your PHP application or CMS?

August 20, 2011 Sankt Augustin

Paul Borgermans & Henri Bergius

About me● Active in open source / PHP community for a while

– PHP based CMS solutions (mostly eZ Publish)

– board member

● Fancying :

– Apache family of projects (mainly Solr)

– NoSQL (Not only SQL) and scalable architectures

– eZ Publish & CMS systems in general

– Semantic aspects

● Contact

paul.borgermans@gmail.com

@paulborgermans

The Pitch

In many cases of web based applications, a content repository is a better alternative for managing and serving content

(as opposed to the lower level SQL stores)

Architecture

Traditional integrated approach

Content Management System

Web Application

Database

Decoupled approach

Abstraction?

Framework

CR CR

OK, but what is a content repository?

A content repository is a provider of ...

● Storage– Flexibility in content modeling

– Durability

– Scalability / Performance

● Services– Read/Write of content, versioning

– Access control

– Information retrieval

– (Analytics)

– (Semantics)

Flexibility

● You want it to swallow anything● The less data design implications, the better● Run-time, scriptable schema's

● Let it map to your data-model effortlessly– Mixing structured and un-structered data/blobs

● From SQL to Object/Document oriented access– Much more natural for most application domains

Durability

● ACID, damn you!

Of course you want it to be safe.. But it might be a trade-off for performance

● Implicit / Explicit versioning (when desired)

Performance / Scalability

● Maybe not always a concern

● But should not be your concern beyond checking that it is scalable!

Services

● Versioning● Information retrieval

– Rich, complex queries/fetches

– Full-text search

– References / Relations

● Access control– Plug-in mechanisms desired

– Mapping of domain specific rules (to the CR)

● Analytics / Semantics– Plugins / Tools

Challenges

● Standardisation in API's– Main API is very proper to

underlying systems

– CMIS

– PHPCR

● Mobile– Content optimisation

– Extra analytics (location, context)

– Off-line use

A selection of possible engines to drive a CR(in NoSQL land)

CouchDB

● Content modeling:Document oriented, schema free

● API: RESTful, (PHP wrapper @koredn)● Scalability: distributed, master-master● Robustness: ACID compliant● Built-in full text search: no● Extra

– Off-line use cases

– Map / Reduce

MongoDB

● Content modeling:Document oriented, schema free

● API: binary protocol, PHP extension available● Scalability: Master-Slave, Sharding● Robustness: at a cost● Built-in full text search: no● Extra

– Updates in place for fields– Rich (ugly?) query syntax

Hbase

● Content modeling: Google big table clone, column oriented

● API: Thrift, HTTP

● Scalability: excellent

● Robustness: Not entirely ACID, but still very good

● Built-in full text search: no

● Extra

– Built in versioning

– Swallows large blobs easily

Apache Solr

● Not so much storage (but can be a caching storage layer too)

● Very rich and powerful Information Retrieval Engine

● API: HTTP, Java, several PHP wrappers

● Scalability: very good, and getting even better*

● Robustness

– SolrCloud* ● Extra: join-like queries*

* Solr 4.0

Lily

http://www.lilyproject.org/

Lily, “big data” content repository

● Provides a very rich feature set● RESTful, Java API● Building on

● Apache license

Over to Henri …

http://www.slideshare.net/bergie/phpcr-standard-content-repository-for-php