Database layer split into a separate component

Team blog: Developers

The Data Access Layer that powers lib.reviews is now its own GitHub project, rev-dal. The DAL is the interface between the web app (what you interact with) and our PostgreSQL database.

The “rev” stands for “revisions” — one thing that characterizes most data in lib.reviews is that it’s versioned and supports multi-author collaboration in principle.

We’ve started using this DAL for another project, AGPWiki, so it made sense to pull it out of the lib.reviews monolith.

This should have no user-facing impact whatsoever, but if anything suddenly throws up weird new errors, please do let us know.