mongodb

Has anybody heard of mongodb very interesting. Could be the next mySQL with a twist.

http://www.mongodb.org/

As long as opengeek (xPDO) and PDO support it. I’m cool.

Yes, it is really nice. I heard that it works wonderfully with the
Lithium PHP framework. Needs to be adapted to MODx directly because
I think it does not need xPDO to work... so it will be hard to do...

Yup, heard of it and currently testing it with a view to replacing some in house software - although interfacing with Python rather than PHP/MODx et al.
Adrian

I’m very interested in finding out if anyone has made ModX work with MongoDB and perhaps using it as a CMS front end for MongoDB.

We’re doing a lot of things with MongoDB on the new modx.com website as a custom database for download stats, partner profiles, and so on. It’s fairly straightforward, but the core MODX app itself is not using Mongo.

Its server doesn’t work on a big-endian machine like a PPC iBook, so I won’t be able to check it out. I suppose processor-specific coding makes for greater optimization, which would be beneficial for a high-performance, real-time database engine. Still, a bit disappointing.

Document databases are really well suited for what Modx does, particularly with the use of TVs etc. - but unfortunately I guess the xpdo core is so tightly linked to SQL that it’s unlikely a new data storage backend could drop in any time soon.

DM

Document DBs have their place. I’ve used MongoDB on a couple projects, and it makes certain tasks really easy... other things are a pain in the ass. E.g. one of the big problem with using MongoDB is *standardizing* your records. Mongo doesn’t care if you have one record with 3 fields and another with 300. You can’t do that with MySQL: you MUST define columns. Mongo stores data as arbitrarily as you can store some huge data structure in the $_SESSION array. But figuring out how to *format* arbitrarily formatted data takes some serious work.

If you at all require any reporting or analytics of your data, then Mongo can be a pain to use. You can give some marketing dudes a MySQL client and BOOM, they can run all kinds of stats on your data. With Mongo? No way. A developer has to code it... and those painful standardizations and awkward joins of Mongo collections (i.e. tables) start looking as painful as the ORM layers that Mongo supposedly replaces.

So it’s great for certain things, but severely limited in others. It would work very well as a caching mechanism, for example.

My interest in using MODx to handle MongoDB is because I have a particularly big project that needs a big CMS and I really, really do not want to be coding the whole CMS; even though that’s what I’ve ended up doing.

I did have a go with Django, whilst it was cool, I kept hitting brick walls and started to worry about whether I was doing things right, whether I could sort security and deployment issues; whereas with PHP I kinda know what to do, how to solve particular problems.

Up to now I’ve been using a bit of CodeIgniter and Kohana to solve my problem, but its taking so damn long just to get something simple done. I did try Yii, but again there is too much of a learning curve with any new framework and I would much prefer to use MODX as a CMS front end and then get it to do whatever I need to with MongoDB.

Then I can concentrate on creating the API to feed my Mobile (iphone) app. Phew.

I am looking forward to a MODX that does work with MongoDB, or if someone is working on it as a new branch that’d be cool too.