Fedora marches forward

I was pleased to see the note that Sandy Payette sent to the fedora-users mailing list earlier today, updating the community on the Fedora 2.2 release date. Version 2.2 is going to include a bunch of features, some of which have been long-awaited and are quite, well, sexy. Some of the highlights:

• Database support has been extended to include Postgres, which should make all the MySQL-haters happy
• Fedora may now be deployed via a .war file in an existing servlet container, such as Tomcat, rather than requiring its very own Tomcat server
• A Lucene- or Zebra-backed search service has been included, which is more robust than the previous search service that used the built-in Dublin Core-populated database

These are but a few of the enhancements, and I can’t wait to put it through its paces when it’s released on January 19th.

For a more complete set of feature enhancements, click on the link above to read Sandy’s message.

Now if we can come together as a community and work on some more UIs, and get them used in some high-profile projects, many of the gripes against Fedora may be silenced. It’s still not a perfect product, but what is? That it uses XML as a storage format and exposes its functions via web-services APIs and allows use of any metadata schema, in my humble opinion, puts it head and shoulders above many other library repository solutions. And for that, it’s at least worth consideration.