[Pdx-pm] Bad news, but some good news buried there

Kyle Dawkins kyle at idealist.org
Wed Dec 8 16:59:30 PST 2010


Hey PDX perl folks

Just a quick note to shed a tear over the platform switch that just occurred here at Idealist.org.  

Since 1995, we (a small non-profit) ran a large, 100% mod_perl-based website (100K unique users per day, 1.2m registered users, millions of page views per week).   Over the past decade or so, we developed a very large web framework, its own custom-written ORM, some cool i18n functionality, clever cascading caching systems, etc.

The bad news is that on Sunday, we switched over to 100% Python-based system built from the ground up on newer tools (like the excellent SqlAlchemy), and running on a whole lot more servers.  The team of Python programmers who built it are a super talented bunch of peeps and they deserve great credit for their work, even though it's in Python! :)

The good news is that the Perl backend of the old site has been retired, and I've been given permission to open source all of the framework code.  Not really a huge consolation, I know, but maybe there's something useful in there to someone!  I am thinking maybe not, but you never know; there's a huge amount of good stuff in there... after all, it's served over a billion pages from a relatively small server setup.

At some point in the very near future, when I get a second, I'll put it up on github.

Cheers

Kyle
kyle at idealist.org


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