Frequently Asked Questions

Everything you wanted to know about Soxer and someone already wanted to know before you.

Questions

  1. Why the name Soxer?
  2. Why create an other CMS? Do we seriously need more dreck?
  3. What’s with the Shirley Temple on the bottom?
  4. Isn’t Ruby too slow for anything serious?
  5. All modern websites use relational databases. Why don’t you?
  6. You can not make a secure multi user CMS this way. Can you?

Answers

Why the name Soxer?

In the 1940’, good Ol’ Blue Eyes spotted a great following from teenage girls. The over zealous lot was named Bobby Soxers.

My Soxer cannot live without Sinatra DSL.

Why create an other CMS? Do we seriously need more dreck?

  1. I was fed up with complexities of CMS platforms on the market.
  2. I was fed up with tearing down the unneeded functionality and circumventing “user friendliness”.
  3. I was fed up with PHP: ugly syntax, verboseness, aimlessness, littered namespace and bad quality of available code.
  4. I was fed up with MySQL. Too complex and finicky for 99% of the time, not robust enough for that crucial 1%.
  5. I was fed up with templating problems, that solved templating problems, that solved templ… (you get the idea)
  6. I was fed up with CMS spending too much of my time on creating and administering content.
  7. I wanted something simple and generic.
  8. I wanted something that could be administered and catered to without a web interface.
  9. I wanted to use Ruby, Sinatra, and HAML for web projects, because they offer none of the traits of PHP, templating and CMS tools.
  10. I want world domination.

What’s with the Shirley Temple on the bottom?

One of Shirley Temple’s last movies was “The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer”. It’s girls her age that started the “bobby soxer generation”. I “want my time back” comes from reading her story on wikipedia. She lost her childhood working 12 hours workdays for Holywood studios. I lost 15 years od my professional life searching for that right tool for the job.
I had to write one at the end.
Now I want my time back.

Isn’t Ruby too slow for anything serious?

While Ruby might be slower than your prefered interpreted language the sped of execution is not a factor here. Check out Computer Language Benchmarks Game. A casual read will reveal that Ruby 1.9 is more than double the speed of PHP and still almost 60 times slower than C. Any debate about the speed of ruby is therefore completely meaningless.

Soxer is designed n a way that URL maps to a file without accessing all files on disk. This means that it has exactly the same speed with one or ten million pages. As per web page aggregations and lists, we are contemplating an unobtrusive caching method. Probbably with memcached. If it’s good enough for Facebook, it’s good enough for Youtube and Wikipedia, it’s good enough for us.

Perhaps we can get fancy with Tokyo Cabinet, but that goes a tad against the original goal of not having a database… But surely makes things cheaper for large filesets because of less ram usage… But then again, spinning the discs spends juice, which is not free either… Can you spot a snifter of Jameson in the sentence above?

As per speed of developement - Ruby is faster, less verbose, more understandable to humans than anytihng I know. Therefore it has an edge where the edge counts. To me. And (unless you run google or youtube) to you too.

All modern websites use relational databases. Why don’t you?

Not really no. The ones using Soxer don’t. Sorry, couldn’t help this shameless plug.

Most computers (modern and old) save files in a file system. The entire URI scheme kind of mimics that. It’s the naure of things these days. I am not advocating current file/direcotry based thinking, but there seems to be no worthy alternative. And when you write that diploma or a job application, you save it in a file, right? Not in a relational database.

You can not make a secure multi user CMS this way. Can you?

This is not the original goal of Soxer. However. Check out tutorials for an example of that too. Instead of bypassing operating system’s security features with a database security and then bypasing that with CMS native security again… We just use the original. Shabam! 2 things less to know and worry about.