Reddit Now Goes Open Source
The popular news aggregator Reddit has gone open source. The Reddit source code is available now and is written largely in Python. The Reddit development site is available at http://code.reddit.com. Here you can download the code, participate in the forum, and help maintain the documentation wiki.
“Reddit announcement can be interpreted in two ways. One is that they are letting developers look inside the engine and add value-add code. Stuff like widget, trackers, analytics plugins etc come to mind immediately.
Second motivation, important one, is to let publishers run their own news voting site. This may appeal to many big news organizations who have passive distrust with Digg like rating sites. News rating engines are prone to manipulation. Digg is famous for it’s community activism. Also there are organized (Digg-gangs) attempts to game the system. This is where Reddit’s open source card (CPAL license is a open source play NOT AN OPEN SOURCE CODE) can be very interesting,” says the Blog onemoreidea.
It’s been known for some time that Reddit was (re)built using Pylons and Mako templates. As it turns out, they’ve also built something of their own database layer, which seems to include a homegrown caching layer and ultimately is built on top of SQLAlchemy, using the SQLA expression language to generate queries. Connections are served with the QueuePool, and they use the threadlocal setting, so that they can get implicit access to transactions in progress. They vertically partition their database access among four separate engines across four distinct areas of functionality on the site.
Since the site is mainly run by the users, the new approach will give the user more power to help in the development of Reddit.com. Also, Reddit has always been one of the most transparent social media communities and yet they still want to be more transparent.
Source: techspot.zzzeek.org
Filed under Open Source Platform, Social networking Software