Railroad is a standards-based repository for large binary files such as digital media, along with their metadata. It is designed to be easy to integrate with content management systems and other client software.

This 0.1 release contains:

• Railroad server components
• Railroad Product

  Building blocks for integrating Railroad in Zope content objects.

• PloneRailroad Product

  Building blocks for integrating Railroad in Plone content objects.

About Railroad

Many CMSes are more suitable for document-style content than they are for managing large files. Managing such large-file content in a CMS can result in scalability issues and deteriorating performance. Railroad instead is dedicated to the task of managing large files and their metadata.

Railroad can be seamlessly integrated into CMSes, leveraging the open WebDAV protocol and simple HTTP messaging. While uploads and downloads of files are fully managed by Railroad and thus routed "around" the CMS, authorization of who can upload or download is still under full control of the CMS using whatever authorization scheme it needs.

Railroad aims to allow multiple clients (such as CMSes) to access the resources in the repository at the same time, thus allowing large data files and their metadata to be centrally managed and shared.

Railroad also makes management of large file data on the filesystem easier for the system administrator. Railroad takes care to categorize files of a different type into separate directories. If a system administrator determines one file type is taking up a lot of space, it is simple to move this information off onto another, larger, partition. It is also possible to run multiple repositories in one Apache instance, or on different machines but using the same database.

Technology and Standards

Railroad uses the industry-standard Apache HTTP server. It uses Apache's mod_dav and mod_python, and metadata is stored in a PostgreSQL database. Information about metadata in a repository can be accessed and manipulated using WebDAV.

CMS support

Preliminary Zope integration including support for Plone.

More information

More information on Railroad:

http://www.infrae.com/products/railroad

More information about Infrae, the company that created Railroad:

http://www.infrae.com

Press Contacts

Jan-Wijbrand Kolman, Infrae, jw at infrae.com