The most advanced publishing system meets the most advanced Unix-like operative system

The title is a bit hyperbolic but this is how I feel about it. Actually I am proud to say that, against any prediction, I was able to submit and get Speedata Publisher approved into the FreeBSD Ports tree.

Going back to lesser nerdy language…

My apologies, technology and nerdy stuff often go hand in hand, allow me to articulate a bit more:

• Speedata Publisher is the main component of Advanced Grid Layout, my template to build premium & professional hybrid (auto and semi-auto) large volume catalogs;

• FreeBSD is the main operating system I use to run my business;

• and the Ports tree is the FreeBSD repository (or archive) for system and third-party software

It shouldn't be secret but as a matter of fact, my workflow is entirely built on opensource software, however rather than being built upon GNU/Linux I elected the BSD world, and specifically FreeBSD.

FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system, derived from the venerable Unix operating system; I elected it because it is reliable, robust, fun, and actively under development; FreeBSD has a lot of interesting features, the main one worth mentioning in this article is the total integration with the ZFS filesystem. The latter is the state of the art of copy-on-write (COW) filesystem, with plenty of features that is not possible to list in this article. What is extremely important is that ZFS guarantees by default:

• Data integrity

• Data snapshot

• Data recovery

With FreeBSD and ZFS your data is protected and fully recoverable at any time and at any moment.

Speedata Publisher is the state of the art for non-interactive desktop publishing software. This application brings together the best of two worlds, coding and design, where the former serves the latter, and this combination allows the design of extremely sophisticated layouts that other similar products, in the same category, can't achieve because their focus is shifted on coding instead.

Why making a port?

Patrick from Speedata does the effort to maintain the Windows version, the Linux version (now only as tarball) and the MacOS version. That is frankly a lot. On my end I learned how to compile from source on GNU/Linux Debian for both AMD64 and ARM64 architecture and for FreeBSD AMD64, however since I work on different FreeBSD workstations, it was becoming tedious to keep Publisher updated everywhere, and therefore I started to feel the urge to make a port and have Publisher available directly from the packages repository.

Where are the benefits?

Benefits are real and worthy. It may not be grasped at a first glance because invisible to end-users so let me articulate about them:

Stability

FreeBSD is an operating system built with stability in its core, differently from GNU/Linux and its thousand flavors, the FreeBSD core components tend to last and to behave the same for decades. Speedata Publisher is built upon the same principle, breaking changes are constantly avoided till the very end. If the operating system and the main component are rock solid and stable, this means that AGL can stay on maintenance mode for a longer period, and therefore I need less time to keep the whole pipeline up-to-date and functional. Everybody knows that once a catalog enters in maintenance mode RenderData.Pro applies a discount (discount based on number of items and complexity of database). These two conditions together guarantee that we will always be capable to keep AGL in maintenance mode.

Reliability

The aforementioned stability in synergy with the aforementioned ZFS filesystem allow RenderData.Pro and AGL to work in a highly resilient and highly reliable environment in which your data is safe, and snapshot, back-up and roll-back are fully integrated and easy to invoke if and when needed. Even though XML datasets are known to be robust and reliable, the extra layer of protection provided by ZFS brings the whole environment to a superior level of resilience. ZFS also provides default data compression; while this is not intrinsically relevant for AGL, it is still a nice addition. With this being said, AGL is built on top of a bullet-proof environment that is basically offered for free (as in beer), not only because it is open-source, but because at RenderData.Pro we invested time and skills to offer the best product available to our customers.

Wrapping this up

Speedata Publisher development is pretty conservative, I don't believe there will be any breakage from version to version, thus I don't expect port maintenance to become a task that will absorb too much of my time. I will continue to contribute to Publisher by making it available on FreeBSD, indirectly helping FreeBSD establish itself as a compelling OS for automated desktop publishing.

This article has been updated for a broad audience and to be mainly focused on Advanced Grid Layout and RenderData.Pro goals and achievements. Ports and LLM/AI evaluations have been removed. For all the technical details about FreeBSD Ports and LLM/AI evaluations I will dedicated a separate in-depth piece.

If your are interested in learning more, please, do not hesitate to contact me and understand how AGL can help to improve the quality of your business and to produce your catalogs better and faster!

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