[Catalyst] Swish-e

[Adam Jacob]

On Mar 22, 2007, at 12:44 PM, Jim Spath wrote:

> What about Xapian?
>
> I noticed that it has some Catalyst support in the form of  
> Catalyst::Model::Xapian.
>
> Xapian also seems like a possible long term solution as it can  
> handle more documents that Swish-e or KinoSeach.

I've done some Catalyst and Xapian work.  There is a lot to like  
about Xapian:

1. It's quite fast
2. It has a fairly sane API
3. It scales for a long time
4. It's pretty easy to write your own query parser, if you need to.

Things I don't like:

1. Perl integration is all XS, and the documentation is lacking.    
It's not such a big deal, because you can just use the C++  
documentation.. but you have to do the translating yourself.
2. Updates to a Xapian index need to happen in a single thread.  This  
sucks if you need to build/rebuild the corpus often, or insert  
millions of documents at a go.

Adam