Monday 3 September 2012

Consolidation of code on Github

I've put all my free software offerings on Github. This service has the advantage of unlimited repositories and collaborators. So I created an "organization" called Hrit-Infrastructure into which I put all the general software components. Outside under my own account I'm putting more specific tools that I use for ingestion of external formats etc. HritServer needs a better installer but I've put a basic set of instructions onto the wiki.

At the moment Hritserver uses couchdb, but my colleagues are porting it for me to Mongodb, which is a lot faster. We want speed, because this is where digital humanities software often falls down. I notice that a lot of new projects and old ones too use interpreted languages like ruby, php and python. Sure they're cool, but they are slooooow. One benchmark I saw tested ruby and found it to be at least 200 times slower than C and Java, and php is 500 times slower. That's why I'm happy that hritserver is written in a composite of those two languages. We will do a lot more than the competition and we will do it blindingly fast.