A hosted “content management system,” aka, a hosted website solution. Based on Scala and Neo4j.
I suspect that Scala and Neo4j make it easier for the system developers to offer a hosted website solution.
I am not sure that in a hosted solution the average web developer will notice the difference.
Still, unless you want a “custom” domain name, the service is “free” with some restrictions.
Would be interested if you can tell that it is Scala and Neo4j powering the usual services?
From “Under the hood”
Multispective.com is a next-generation content management system. In this post we will look how this system works and how this setup can benefit our users.
Unlike most other content management systems, multispective.com is entirely built in the programming language Scala, which means it runs on the rock-solid and highly performant Java Virtual Machine.
Scala offers us a highly powerful programming model, greatly cutting back the amount of software we had to write, while its powerful type system reduces the number of potential coding errors.
Another unique feature of multispective.com is the use of the Neo4j database engine.
Nearly all content management systems in use today, store their information in a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), a proven technology ubiquitous around the ICT spectrum.
Relational Database Management Systems are very useful and have become extremely robust through decades of improvements, but they are not very well suited for highly connected data.
The world-wide-web is highly connected and in our search for the right technology for our software, we decided a different approach towards storage of data was needed.
Neo4j ended up to be the prefered solution for our storage needs. This database engine is based upon the model of the property-graph. Where a RDBMS stores information in tables, Neo4j stores information as nodes and relationships, where both can contain properties.
The data model of the property-graph is extremely simple, so it’s easy to reason about.
There were two main advantages to a graph-database for us. First of all, relationships are explicitly stored in the database. This makes navigating over complex networked data possible while maintaining a reasonable performance. Secondly, a graph database does not require a schema.