What's up with Syncato

It's been kind of quiet on the Syncato front for ... well for quite a while. I've recently seen a few rumblings around the net about the project being abandoned and I'm happy to say that's not the case. I ran into two problems with the development of Syncato that stalled progress. First I got the system to the point where it worked well enough for what I needed. It's been running this site for about a year now and I've been happy with it. This kind of took some of my drive away while I went and worked on other things. However, that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was too grand a vision for what I really wanted the system to do. I've actually been quietly chipping away at the system during this period, I was just making too many major changes to release anything. I'm still caught in that cycle as the next release is still in pieces on my hard drive. The good news is that I've made substantial progress over the past week and the basic system is once again running with a much more advanced set of features.

The single largest change with the next release is that the Syncato system and the weblog application will be completely separated. This has been my major stumbling block for progress as I wanted Syncato to be a generic platform for developing XML data driven applications. This required a number of changes including adding support for multiple databases, an internal roll based security system, a reworked XSL templating system, completely reworked configuration system and an entirely new concept for running multiple applications under the same Syncato instance. I'm also converting the existing REST API to be more compatible with the ATOM API. The good news is that most of this work is done and I was finally able to run my first rudimentary application on the system last night.

The bad news is that the weblog application still has to be converted, of course it's also exciting to finally be moving on to that stage. While converting the weblog application I'm also converting it to use the ATOM data model and API. This means that the system will not be backwards compatible with the old data. Of course, it's all XML so XSL-T will be able to make the conversions.

There's still a lot of work to do before I'm ready to make another release, but I think the new system is really promising and could be quite cool once the kinks are worked out. Just don't ask me when the release will come. :-)

Posted by Kimbro Staken