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Islandora Architecture Diagram

Detailed diagram of the Islandora platform and its components

Diagram prepared by Bethany Seeger based on work done by Gavin Morris

Components

Islandora

The following components are microservices developed and maintained by the Islandora community. They are bundled under Islandora Crayfish:

  • FITS - A Symfony 4 Microservice to generate FITS data and persist it as a Drupal media node. Works with Islandora FITS
  • Homarus - Provides FFmpeg as a microservice for generating video and audio derivatives.
  • Houdini - ImageMagick as a microservice for generating image-based derivatives, including thumbnails.
  • Hypercube - Tesseract as a microservice for optical character recognition (OCR).
  • Milliner - A microservice that converts Drupal entities into Fedora resources.
  • Recast - A microservice that remaps Drupal URIs to add Fedora-to-Fedora links based on associated Drupal URIs in RDF.

Other Open Source

The following components are deployed with Islandora, but are developed and maintained by other open source projects:

  • Apache - The Apache HTTP Server, colloquially called Apache, is a free and open-source cross-platform web server software. Provides the environment in which Islandora and its components run.
  • ActiveMQ - Apache ActiveMQ is an open source message broker written in Java together with a full Java Message Service client.
  • Karaf - A modular open source OSGi runtime environment.
  • Tomcat - an open-source implementation of the Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages, Java Expression Language and WebSocket technologies. Tomcat provides a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment in which Java code can run.
  • Solr - An open-source enterprise-search platform. Solr is the default search and discover layer of Islandora, and a key component in some methods for migration to Islandora from Islandora Legacy
  • Blazegraph - Blazegraph is a triplestore and graph database.
  • Cantaloupe - an open-source dynamic image server for on-demand generation of derivatives of high-resolution source images. Used in Islandora to support IIIF
  • Drupal - Drupal is an open source content management system, and the heart of Islandora. All user and site-building aspects of Islandora are experienced through Drupal as a graphical user interface.
  • Fedora - A robust, modular, open source repository system for the management and dissemination of digital content. The default smart storage for Islandora.
  • Matomo - Matomo, formerly Piwik, is a free and open source web analytics application. It provides usage statistics and a rich dashboard for Islandora.
  • MySQL - MySQL is an open-source relational database management system. Used as a Drupal database in Islandora, it can be easily replaced with other database management systems such as PostgreSQL
  • Triplestore - See Blazegraph.
Last update: October 11, 2023