Is there any future for Emdros?

It has been over 6 years since the last post on this blog, so many will wonder if there is a future for this blog and Emdros. For the blog, we have two guest bloggers lined up for 2015; they both know Ulrik Sandborg-Petersen (USP) really well, so watch this space and you will get a behind the scenes insight into the person behind the Emdros – we may even get to know whether excerpts from this blog are read as New Years Eve buffoonery just before midnight.

About Emdros, who better to ask than USP himself? So, USP, is there a future for Emdros?

I believe there is a future for Emdros, yes. In fact, the best days are yet ahead for Emdros, I believe.

There, I said it. Chamberlain would have been proud of me. But, joking aside, I do believe that Emdros has a bright future ahead.


What can we expect in 2015?

I am working on several strands of development for Emdros.

One is scalability. I hope to put scale-out capabilities into Emdros in 2015, so that you can run Emdros on several servers at once and query really large amounts of data, as in “big data”.

Another strand is the more modest goal of putting a REST API on top of the existing Emdros C++ API.

A third strand is reworking the way things are stored in the SQL backends, in anticipation of the “big data” capabilities.

A fourth strand is the BPT backends, the proprietary storage layers which outperform even SQLite3, and which pack the data better than any of the other backends. The existence of the BPT backends, together with the harvesting layer, mean that it is feasible to deliver content through Emdros on mobile platforms (iOS and Android). The harvesting layer makes it very fast to “play back” parts of a document stored in an Emdros database, and the BPT engine makes it easy (and feasible, performance-wise) to deliver small databases with lots of content onto mobile platforms for offline consumption.


Is it correct that you have resigned from your job as Associate Professor at Aalborg University?

Yes, that is correct. I am now officially an independent consultant writing software for my clients. If you happen to know anyone who needs a software programmer with expertise in Biblical Greek and Biblical Hebrew, as well as typesetting and programmatic text transformation, please ask them to get in touch.

I have not completely severed the ties with Aalborg University, however. I continue to have an affiliation with the University as a researcher, with the right to publish research in their name. I have some publications in the pipeline which I'd like to get out as and when the opportunity arises.


What does this mean for Emdros? What does it mean for people who use the product? What is your commercial offering now?

As for what my change of jobs means for Emdros, I think I will have more time to develop Emdros in a way that will be helpful to a lot of people.

As for what it means for users, I think there will be more people who can benefit directly from Emdros, once I have developed the engine further.

As for my commercial offering, licensees can still license Emdros subsequent to negotiation of a licensing agreement with my company. Or they can elect to use Emdros under the GNU Public License version 2, which is how Emdros is Open Sourced.


What is your New Year resolution for Emdros?

To keep advancing the development of Emdros.