In about every meeting or presentation we participate in, we’re asked about the PINES/Evergreen servers, what they are, where they live, how many there are… basically, what is behind the green curtain? Some PINES librarians that attended the focus group meetings we held in February got an opportunity to take a tour of the datacenter and see the PINES server cluster for themselves. Unfortunately, for the rest of you, we’ve had to resort to whiteboard drawings and obtuse hand gestures.
A few quick platform updates
- We’ve decided to move all RDBMS development to MySQL. MS Sequel Server was a close second, but since Oracle bought up all the MySQL storage engines of consequence, what could go wrong?!?!
- We’ll be moving all first generation OpenSRF applications to Python, because, well, I was wrong. Whitespace is syntax.
- Also, no more JSON. We’re going RDF all the way, baby!
- I’ve seen the error of my ways with SuperCat. Instead of trying to supply a secure, abstracted, simple interface to the catalog I will simply put a thin XML wrapper on top of the new MySQL database. Sure, there will be security issues if anyone figures out the names of tables containing user data, but how can they know that if I don’t document them. Problem solved!
Ok .. I didn’t even try to make it believable. I was going for a “it’s so crazy it might just work” angle. Eh, eh?
UPDATE: As noticed by Ross, we failed to address the Library 2.0 functionality. To that end we’ll be replacing all subject authority data with user supplied tags. You’ll do our cataloging for us via a Z39.50 interface. What’s more Library 2.0 than that, I ask you!