Archive for the Server Category
The State of Nooku 2011
Past weekend, the Nooku Team was at the Dutch Joomladays, as both sponsors and speakers. The event sold completely out. Two days with 200 attendees each, that’s a lot of interesting people to meet. Very positive vibe and and superb organisation, one of the best Joomladays I ever attended. A big congrats to everyone who helped to make this happen.
We have a tradition of showing something new each year at the Dutch Joomladays, so Tom and myself were very proud to officially announce our Nooku Platform and present our second State of Nooku.
Nooku Server loses 40% weight
Last December we announced our plans for Nooku Server, a multi-site and multi-lingual distribution of Joomla 1.5. With the help of our community we created a diet for Nooku Server and defined a roadmap.
For the first alpha we are focusing on implementing the key ingredients of our diet. Most of the work involves removing legacy code, legacy libraries and doing clean-up. In the past weeks we have been making steady progress.
- Core extensions: All the components, plugins and templates that didn’t made it into our list have been removed
- XML-RPC: XML-RPC support has been removed
- PDF: PDF support has been removed
- Legacy: Legacy support for Joomla 1.0 and PHP4 has been removed
- Security: All assets (css,js,images) have been moved to the media folder
- Libraries: Legacy libraries have been removed
- Performance: Hit support in Content and Weblinks has been removed
- Mootools: Mootools has been upgraded to 1.2 including the compatibility layer
- Framework: Nooku Framework has been added
With most of the refactoring completed it’s time to weigh the result. I have done a code count today to compare the code bases of Joomla 1.0, 1.5, 1.6 and Nooku Server. I used Ohcount, a little command line tool that is also used by Ohloh to do code counting.
We have made Nooku Server a whooping 40% lighter in code size. Yes, you read that right, we removed 40% code and we added a whole new framework at the same time.
Here are the detailed results:
A roadmap for Nooku Server
With Nooku Server’s diet established, we now have a good idea of the work that needs to be done. A next step in the process is to define a little roadmap.
Over the next 4 months, we are going to be rolling out alpha releases implementing the key ingredients as defined in our little diet and at the same time adding key features.
We will be working towards releasing an alpha about once every four weeks. This gives the following roadmap :
- Alpha 1 : February
- Alpha 2 : March
- Alpha 3 : April
Under ideal conditions Nooku Server would go beta in May 2011, right in time for JAB11.
Our development flow will be focused on maintaining the stability of the Joomla 1.5 core. Scope for the alpha releases will be kept very limited in order to avoid scope creep. For each alpha we will focus on one major feature or task.
Creating a diet for Nooku Server
A little over a month ago we announced our plans for Nooku Server, a multi-site Joomla 1.5 distribution. Before starting to integrate new features in Nooku Server we are giving the Joomla core a thorough code, features and performance review.
Joomla 1.5 core feature survey. To get a better idea of the features used, or more importantly not used in Joomla 1.5, we did a little survey with very interesting results. Almost 250 people filled it out, big thanks to all of you who did!
Results
1. Which Joomla core features do you use ?
You can find the result here. If we would apply the 80/20 rule the only feature that you really need and use is ‘Content’. All the rest of the core features is used less then 80%. If we turn the 80/20 rule around and we check which features are used at least by 20% of you, we get the following list:
- 82% – Content
- 68% – Search
- 46% – Contacts
- 34% – TinyMCE
- 32% – PDF rendering
- 29% – XML-RPC support
- 28% – Newsfeeds
- 22% – Banners
Still an interesting list. You are not using LDAP, Gmail or the XStandard editor at all. You also don’t use any of the core site templates, nor do you require build in help.
2. What is the number one feature you are missing in the Joomla core ?
You can find the result here. If we look at the features you are missing most we get the following top 3:
- 20% – Multi-site
- 18% – Improved permissions
- 13% – Multi-lingual support
The most interesting is that improved permissions, which is the major new feature for Joomla 1.6, is not the most needed feature. Instead most of you are looking for multi-site support.
Based on the results of both questions we can conclude that what you really need is not a CMS but instead you are looking for a flexible, customisable, multi-site and multi-lingual web application platform. And that’s exactly what we are going to build!
MySQL Query Cache
As some would be aware we have been working on a multi-site installation of Joomla! that is running in excess of 130 sites for the Belgium Police. Needless to say performance is paramount hence we have spent a considerable amount of time researching and deploying the right server technologies. This has included the use of Nginx rather than Apache, APC for opcode caching and a little gem in MySQL called query_cache.
Query cache is something that to my knowledge only existed in MySQL until Oracle released 11g. It’s not the same as the caching historically found in Oracle and Microsoft SQL, both of which would cache the method/procedure but not the result set.
MySQL’s query cache is a must have configuration which is as simple to configure as to allocate it with some memory. To see if you’re already running it try this in command line…
Putting Nooku Server on a diet
Development of Nooku Server is blazing ahead. Integration of the multi-site features has started. If all goes as planned we should be able to demo a first workable version on our upcoming Nooku Jam in Rotterdam this weekend.
At Nooku we pride ourselves by doing more with less. And when we mean less we mean a lot less, as Stian nicely demostrated in his latest blog post.
Joomla 1.5 counts nearly 300k lines of code. That’s a lot of code ! Before we start improving Nooku Server, we would like to cut away any unused features.
To do that we need your help. We are curious to find out which Joomla core extensions you are using, and more importantly what features you are not using. If you have a moment please fill out our little form below and let us know. Thanks !
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Nooku Server, Joomla on steroids
Our partners, from the first participants to latest newcomers, each have played a role in the growth of Nooku. Not only have they contributed to build our project; they embody the philosophy of Joomla and Open Source: to choose collaboration over competition, to choose innovation over commerce, and to contribute to the benefit of everyone.
Over the past 3 years the combined efforts of our partners allowed us to build innovative Open Source technology: First Nooku Content, for multilingual management, and later Nooku Framework, a new brain for Joomla. Today, together with the Belgian Police we are taking a next step.
The Belgian Police and Joomla
Belgium being the small country it is counts no less then 190 police zones. Each of those 190 police zones has it’s own website, running different (proprietary) systems. After the release of Joomla 1.5 in 2008 most zones took the plunge and migrated their sites to Joomla 1.5. At the moment 130 zones are using Joomla.
Until recently all of those installations where hosted separately on one dedicated server. To increase the usability, ease of maintenance and continued growth, the Belgian Police asked us to help them to build a multi-site platform. And off course we said yes !
