Last thursday, i did the webinar about PHPCR and Magnolia CMS. You can download the slides or watch the recorded presentation (you need to register to see it). Thanks to all the attendees, I hope you enjoyed it.
There where some questions that i want to answer here on the blog to have the answers available to everybody.
Liip is a PHP company but we are not agnostic to what happens in other fields. And sometimes we need to integrate with other systems like a Java based CMS. Rather than using something radical like Quercus, a Java implementation of the PHP language or the rather fiddly PHP/Java Bridge, we wanted something less intrusive and more general purpose.
PHPCR is an important technology for us at Liip. The most mature content storage implementation to be used with PHPCR is Jackrabbit, which we for example use on liip.ch.
The Doctrine PHPCR-ODM allows you to easily map your PHP objects onto content repository nodes. Since last week, the PHPCR-ODM leverages the versioning support of PHPCR in the ODM layer. This gives your application a very simple way to work with versioned content.
This weekend we had a hackday on PHPCR. The goal was to coordinate the efforts of Midgard to implement PHPCR with the Jackalope project. We ended up doing a few important cleanups to the PHPCR API definition (see below). We had Henri and Eero from the Midgard project, Benjamin from the Doctrine project and Jordi, Lukas, Chregu and myself (David) from Liip. On the second day, Uwe, Johannes and Dan join us to push the PHPCR doctrine layer further.
And here's another blog post about jackrabbit clusters and how to make your life better.
As you maybe know, we use Jackrabbit for some of our projects and plan to use it even more. I personally still like the idea of it and until now it did what it promised.
As announced recently, there will be a PHPCR hackday and workshop in Switzerland. The workshop will take place sunday 8th of may at the liip office in zurich, Feldstrasse 133. If you are interested, please sign up on this wiki page.
I often get asked by potential employees and clients, why we do PHP and mostly PHP only. A valid question, of course and my first answer usually is (besides the "historical reasons" one), that nowadays all those server side (scripting) languages are mainly the glue layer between the front-end (the browser part) and the back-end (your storage and "database" solution) and not the one and only defining factor if your project will be a success. Or not.
