DBSlayer, or how NYTimes.com achieves geek cool and a fast site

DBSlayer is a lightweight JSON DB layer written to help NYTimes.com scale beyond the traditional LAMP stack scaling techniques.

As they say, apart from a real number of advantages it gives: "it just seemed really cool to have a JSON-speaking DB layer that all our scriptable content could talk to. Thus, the DBSlayer was born." It's licensed under the Apache v2 license.

I like open-source projects born in the heat of real high load, fast moving media sites. Django is another one, and is used for the Washington Post's site, among others.

(10/31/07: Edited to add tags)