Silver is a database cacher, indexer and searcher backed by the NoSQL database Redis and released by the tech team behind the political blog Talking Points Memo. It’s open source and was created in Ruby.
“Silver is designed to be a simple, lightweight wrapper for all your calls to a database that you want to cache or index with Redis,” writes Silver developer Erik Hinton. “It is completely database/web-service agnostic so you should be able to use if for anything you can imagine caching.”
It sounds like this is only the beginning for open source from TPM. Hinton writes “Over the next few months — and, God-willing, for ages to come — we will be rolling out a series of open-source tools to contribute to the growing, fecund field of journo-coding/data-driven-reporting/technocratic inquiry.”
It’s exciting to see a media organization not just using open source software, but also contributing. It’s not entirely unprecedented – the Lawrence Journal-World released Django, for instance – but it’s always appreciated.
