Silo 2021-07-04 "Dawn's Early Light"

A new day dawns on some old software.

In the dark ages (circa 2006), when getting a web shell with PHP support was easy and not too expensive compared to other options, Zero Linden (Mark Lentczner) wrote Silo, a web based key value store that could serve as a persistent data store for scripted SecondLife objects. Remarkably, the PHP script he wrote works to this day, but the tests were in Python 1.5...which wasn't so lucky. It also depended on Apache which is still in use but there are many other options now for serving PHP scripts.

I was using the Silo as a rendezvous service in a non-SL project and had hosted the github for the original tarball for 7 years (https://github.com/jdougan/zeros-silo) , I wanted to temporarily host test Silos on Replit (a web browser based development IDE) and while it worked, the tests wouldn't run on Python 3. So I took the opportunity to reopen Silo development and rewrite and update to modern tools without removing the essential simplicity of the approach. If you want a complex, secure, and very scalable key value store, this isn't it. If you want a minimal requirement service that can run on a cheap $3/month PHP/WordPress account, please consider Silo.