Something for the weekend - Lily 0.2 is OUT ! :)

[Steven Noels <st...@outerthought.org>]

Dear all,

three months after the highly anticipated proof of architecture release,
we're living up to our promises, and are releasing Lily 'CR' 0.2 today - a
fully-distributed, highly scalable and highly available content repository,
marrying best-of-breed database and search technology into a powerful,
productive and easy-to-use solution for contemporary internet-scale content
applications.
For whom

You're building content applications (content management, archiving, asset
management, DMS, WCMS, portals, ...) that scale well, either as a product, a
project or in the cloud. You need a trustworthy underlying content
repository that provides a flexible and easy-to-use content model you can
adapt to your requirements. You have a keen interest in NoSQL/HBase
technology but needs a higher-level API, and scalable indexing and search as
well.
Foundations

Lily builds further upon Apache HBase and Apache SOLR. HBase is a faithful
implementation of the Google BigTable database, and provides infinite
elastic scaling and high-performance access to huge amounts of data. SOLR is
the server version of Lucene, the industry-standard search library. Lily
joins HBase and SOLR in a single, solidly packaged content repository
product, with automated sharding (making use of multiple hardware nodes to
provide scaling of volume and performance) and automatic index maintenance.
Lily adds a sophisticated, yet flexible and surprisingly practical content
schema on top of this, providing the structuredness of more classic
databases, versioning, secondary indexing, queuing: all the stuff developers
care for when fixing real-world problems.
Key features of this release

   - Fully distributed: Lily has a fully-distributed architecture making
   maximum use of all available hardware for scalability and availability.
   ZooKeeper is used for distributed process coordination, configuration and
   locking. Index maintenance is based on an HBase-backed RowLog mechanism
   allowing fast but reliable updating of SOLR indexes.
   - Index maintenance: Lily offers all the features and functionality of
   SOLR, but makes index maintenance a breeze, both for interactive as-you-go
   updating and MapReduce-based full index rebuilds
   - Multi-indexers: for high-load situations, multiple indexers can work in
   parallel and talk to a sharded SOLR setup
   - REST interface: a flexible and platform-neutral access method for all
   Lily operations using HTTP and JSON
   - Improved content model: we added URI as a base Lily type as a (small)
   indication of our interest in semantic technology

More importantly, we commit ourselves to take care of API compatibility and
data format layout from this release onwards - as much as humanly possible.
Lily 0.2 offers the API we want to support in the final release. Lily 0.2 is
our contract for content application developers, upgrading to Lily final
should require them to do as little code or data changes as possible.
>From where

Download Lily from www.lilyproject.org. It's Apache Licensed Open Source. No
strings attached.
Enterprise support

Together with this release, we're rolling out our commercial support
services <http://outerthought.org/site/services/lily.html> (and signed up a
first customer, yay!) that allows you to use Lily with peace of mind. Also,
this release has been fully tested and depends on the latest Cloudera
Distribution for Hadoop <http://www.cloudera.com/hadoop/> (CDH3 beta3).
Next up

Lily 1.0 is planned for March 2011, with an interim release candidate in
January. We'll be working on performance enhancements, feature additions,
and are happily - eagerly - awaiting your feedback and comments. We'll post
a roadmap for Lily 0.3 and onwards by mid November.
Follow us

If you want to keep track of Lily's on-going development, join the Lily
discussion list or follow our company Twitter
@outerthought<http://twitter.com/#%21/outerthought>
.
Thank you

I'd like to thank Bruno and Evert for their hard work so far, the HBase and
SOLR community for their help, the IWT government fund for their partial
financial support, and all of our early Lily adopters and enthusiasts for
their much valued feedback. You guys rock!

Steven.
-- 
Steven Noels
http://outerthought.org/
Open Source Content Applications
Makers of Kauri, Daisy CMS and Lily