This document discusses content repositories as an alternative to traditional SQL databases for managing content in web applications. It defines a content repository as providing storage, flexibility in content modeling, durability, scalability, and services like versioning, access control, search, and analytics. Several possible content repository engines are mentioned, including CouchDB, MongoDB, HBase, Apache Solr, and Lily Project, analyzing their features around content modeling, APIs, scalability, robustness, search capabilities, and extras. The document advocates for content repositories to manage content more flexibly and natively than SQL databases.

1. A content repository for your
PHP application or CMS?
August 20, 2011 Sankt Augustin
Paul Borgermans & Henri Bergius

2. 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

3. 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)

4. Architecture
Traditional integrated approach Decoupled approach
Content Management System
Web Application
Framework
Abstraction?
CR CR
Database

5. OK, but what is a content repository?

6. 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)

7. 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

8. 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)

9. Performance / Scalability
● Maybe not always a
concern
● But should not be your
concern beyond checking
that it is scalable!

10. 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

11. 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

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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. Lily
http://www.lilyproject.org/

18. Lily, “big data” content repository
● Provides a very rich feature set
● RESTful, Java API
● Building on
● Apache license

22. Over to Henri …
http://www.slideshare.net/bergie/phpcr-standard-content-repository-for-php