Dear friends, colleagues, and keepers of Culture Heritage and Memory,
For more than 27 years, Dédalo has been working to manage Cultural Heritage. You have trusted it with coins and hoards, oral histories, archaeological records, intangible and the intricate thesauri that give structure to our shared heritage and memory.
We don’t take that trust lightly. Software that carries data like this has an unusual duty: it has to outlive its own technology. Your collections will still matter in thirty years; the code that holds them must be alive, understandable, and trustworthy for just as long.
With that in mind, we are writing to share some important news: we have rebuilt Dédalo’s engine from the ground up.
The Heart of Dédalo Stays the Same
First, let us reassure you. If you are a curator or researcher who uses Dédalo every day, your experience is not changing. The screens, the editing forms, the way you log in, all of it remains deliberately unchanged (we change only some cosmetics to be more user friendly). The rewrite is happening under the hood, like replacing the engine of a beloved vehicle without changing how you drive it or where your cargo sits.
Your data remains in the same PostgreSQL database, the same records, and the same meticulous versioning you rely on.
V7 will introduce some data changes to implement dataframe for literals (as we are planning for years) and other technical details that will be implemented in the same way as other previous data improvements. Nothing outside of normal Dédalo evolution.
And crucially, the soul of Dédalo, the living ontology that lets you reshape the catalog without needing to rebuild the code, remains intact. You can still add fields, turn text boxes into pickers, and define new kinds of records just as you always have. That defining idea is safe.
Why We Did It
Rewriting a mature system is not a decision we made lightly. We undertook this for reasons that are specific, honest, and aimed at the future:
To Make It Faster: The old runtime model was a bit like a chef who could only cook one dish at a time. The new engine is a kitchen that can handle multiple tasks in parallel, meaning you will see noticeably faster performance.
To Shed the Weight of Time: After more than twenty years, software accumulates scar tissue, layers of old fixes and ways of doing things that were necessary once but no longer serve us. This rewrite is a rare chance to clean house and keep the good foundations.
To Make It Teachable: For a small team, the greatest risk isn’t a line of code; it’s whether a new person can learn the system and keep it alive. The new codebase is modern, modular, and well-documented. It is designed to be welcoming to the next generation of maintainers, be they human or, increasingly, AI.
To Prepare for the Future: We are standing at the threshold of incredible new possibilities in the Digital Humanities. Tasks that were impossible a few years ago are now within reach. We have rebuilt Dédalo on a modern foundation to be a natural partner for these new tools, bringing AI capabilities directly into the heritage workflow.
What’s Really New
For those who care about the technical details, we’ve made some significant leaps:
A Modern Runtime: We’ve moved from a PHP server to a TypeScript server on the Bun runtime. This gives us a persistent, high-performance engine that handles requests efficiently and safely, eliminating a whole category of subtle bugs. You can learn more here
A Simplified Architecture: Instead of a complex web of interconnected classes, the new system is built on a clear, descriptive model. It’s like we took a messy workshop and organized it into a clean, well-lit space where every tool has its place.
Security Built-in: We have designed a brand-new, native authentication system that meets and exceeds all modern security standards, keeping your data safe.
Built to be Tested: We have treated the old system as the "source of truth" and have rigorously tested the new engine against it, ensuring that it matches the original, only faster and more robust.
New publication API: As part of the Dédalo evolution ,v7 will introduce a new publication API v2 rewrite into TypeScript to provide a resource-oriented REST API. You can learn more here
An Act of Stewardship
Ultimately, this rewrite is an act of stewardship. We believe that a system that holds the cultural record must itself be built to last. By investing in this new engine today, we are ensuring that Dédalo can serve you, and the generations to come, for another twenty years and beyond.
The mission remains exactly the same: to help you produce good data, and to keep it safe.
Thank you for your trust, your partnership, and the incredible work you do. We are honored to build this tool for you.
With warmth and respect,
The Dédalo Team
P.S. The new engine is now complete and in beta v7. We are excited for you to experience it.
