Pilaster PHP Library in GitHub

Over the holiday break, I decided to dust off the Pilaster document database and bring it up to some acceptable level of stability.

As it stands now, Pilaster is a document database that provides similar capabilities to that of MongoDB. It is nowhere near as performant as MongoDB -- then again, it's written in pure PHP and does not require a separate application.

I figured it would be useful for smaller system or for applications running on hosted platforms.

In the backend, it uses Lucene (or, rather Zend's port of Lucene) to provide a high(-ish) performance datastore. You can search it using either name/value arrays or search strings. Yes, search strings are the database's query language. Weird... I know.

To test it out (and contribute, if you'd like), take a look at the Git repository here:

http://github.com/technosophos/Pilaster

If you want to start with a build of it, you can download 2.0-alpha1 (or whatever today's latest version is) by going here:

http://github.com/technosophos/Pilaster/downloads

Versions

When I initially developed Pilaster, it was basically a form of the Sinciput and Rhizome projects. It worked, but it was very tied to the way those systems used data. That was Pilaster 1.x.

As I took a fresh look at Pilaster in December, I realized that I could make it much more generic -- in short, I could make it work with native data structures! With minimal refactoring, I changed the entire Pilaster data model.

I decided that would be Pilaster 2.x.

Pilaster is not quite stable. The unit tests for the main public API all pass. However, the low-level driver is not complete. Import and export still need to be added. I am also uncertain as to how stable the Zend index really is. Your testing can help me discover what works and what doesn't.

Rhizome Status

Rhizome is the new backend that will drive Sinciput (it is a complete replacement of Pilaster, which was a good, but limited, architecture).

In a nutshell, Rhizome is a non-hierarchical storage and retrieval engine that includes full text searching, metadata-based data retrieval, relationship support, and an open extension mechanism.

While Pilaster was limited to a single sort of data storage mechanism (namely, Berkeley DB), Rhizome has no such limitation. Further, while Pilaster required that the repository and the index files be located in the same "place", Rhizome makes no such requirement.

As it stands now, Rhizome has the following items completed already:

• A handful of classes implementing the new Rhizome XML format.
• A core set of managing classes and interfaces.
  
• A file system implementation of the repository.
• A Lucene-based implementation of the search indexing code.

The main task left, now, is to implement the searching interface for Lucene, which will provide a method of performing either semi-structured or completely structured searches of the Rhizome repository.