Focus of the Midgard developer community is swiftly moving to the Midgard2 architecture, and this means that changes will be coming to the rest of the framework.

One obvious victim is the Repligard database replication and packaging tool. While Repligard works acceptably for its intended purpose, stretching it to situations like filtered staging/live and database structure conversions has caused issues with both reliability and performance. And in addition to this, Repligard is not yet able to work with MgdSchema objects.

Clearly something needs to be done about the situation. What could be the viable replacement is Exorcist, the cross-CMS replication tool created by Midgard Project co-founder and JCR contributor Jukka Zitting. Not only is Exorcist built on much more robust model, it also communicates with Midgard using the Midgard-Java bindings that are built directly on top of the MgdSchema and Query Builder.

Pros for making Exorcist the Repligard replacement:

• Possibility to create workflow and content filters using XSLT
• Cross-CMS capabilities, replicate between Midgard and other CMSs using either one-to-one bindings or Portable Site Information
• Real possibility for multidirectional replication
• P2P replication using the Digital Business Ecosystem network
• Project could be shared between different CMSs
• No need to separately port it to support new Midgard features

And cons:

• Existing scripts and working habits based on Repligard will cease to work
• More Java dependency (although we recommend it already now)