The number of news-site oriented open source projects that are in the offing seem much more than I had imagined. I had referred to a couple of open source projects in an earlier post just a few days ago; here are  a few more I came across in recent times.

The first one is from the New York Times:  it’s called NYT Transformer and is made up of 10,000 lines of PHP code: it can be used to  process data using generic input and output objects.  Considering the context in which it has been put to use I image that several media organisations too can find ways of making use of  it.

LINK: NYT Transformer page
SOURCE: New York Times

The model is simple: NYT_Transformer accepts records from an input source, passes them through filters and sends them to an output object. It can also perform further data manipulation, such as changing the data in the resulting records or discarding records based on criteria you specify…..

At The New York Times, NYT_Transformer was created in 2006 to load movie data (in XML) into a MySQL database. The initial loader was then made into a more generic framework that could be extended and reused for future projects. The framework has since been used to generate a variety of pages…..

And if you go ahead and visit the page you will find links to some of Times’ other open source projects as well: something they call DBSlayer, which is “.. a lightweight database abstraction layer suitable for high-load websites where you need the scalable advantages of connection pooling. Written in C for speed, DBSlayer talks to clients via JSON over HTTP, meaning it’s simple to monitor and can swiftly interoperate with any web framework you choose.”

And also to the XSL Cache extension, which is “a modification of PHP’s standard XSL extension that caches the parsed XSL stylesheet representation between sessions for 2.5x boost in performance for sites that repeatedly apply the same transform. Although there is still some further work that could be done on the extension, this code is already proving beneficial in production use for a few applications on the New York Times’ website.”