Calliope 0.2.1: Moving to Mongo and Tomcat

This project is about Digital Scholarly Editions or DSEs. These are Web-based publications of cultural heritage texts. My design for DSEs calls for a REST Web Service, originally called hritserver, but now renamed Calliope, which provides the components for building a DSE within a Web authoring environment like a CMS. The infrastructure looks like this:

As you can see, at the bottom there is a database, including an images handler. Currently Calliope uses CouchDB and stores the images in the file system for speed. But I now have made it possible to define a single Java class to extend Calliope to handle other databases. MongoDB, a rival NoSql database to CouchDB, is supposed to be faster. Unlike Couch it handles images well, through the GridFS module, making replication of the entire database easier. In Couch you have to attach images to documents, and word has it that when those images are large it becomes sluggish. One advantage of Couch, though, is its revision control, which Mongo lacks. In Mongo, your latest copy of a document is your only copy.

The architecture has also a number of canonical views, which are only suggestions. They can be extended, customised and redecorated. They also know nothing about which database they are running on. They communicate with the Calliope service, which gives them partial Web-pages, which they use to compose the views. This is thus a pure example of the familiar Model-View-Controller paradigm.

Another improvement in version 0.2.1 is making it able to run equally well in Jetty embedded mode or Tomcat. The difference is that in Jetty the web application is part of a runnable application that makes it easy to debug and set up, as well as launch. Tomcat uses a plugin type of architecture where Web applications are stored in WAR files (really ZIP or JAR archives), which are really just directories with configuration information. Tomcat acts as a Web Server and hands off control of everything in the WebApp's context to the stuff unpacked from the WAR file. So one difference is that the URL for the Jetty test service is http://localhost/tests/ and for Tomcat at the moment it is http://localhost:8080/calliope/tests/ (Calliope is the name of the WAR file). So what I have now is a combination of two ways to launch Calliope: via Jetty or Tomcat, using either of two databases, Couch and Mongo, so there are a total of four possible configurations. This kind of flexibility helps others to consider adopting your software.