So far, I have been working on the indexing part of Beacon, which is nearly complete. In the coming weeks, I will be running beacond (now index_server) as a service in the background so that I can find and squash whatever bugs remain in the code. For now, index_server is blazing fast, but that might be because the indexes I test against are just a few megabytes in size. From what I hear, though, CLucene can easily handle indexes which are several gigabytes in size without blinking an eye, so speed might not be an issue as the indexes grow. Anyway, any potential performance bottlenecks will only show themselves once people start using index_server regularly.
After more than a week of thinking, "Today is the day I'll write that blog post", here I am with a status update on my HCD2009 project. I have only a few more points to add to what Matt has already posted here.
First of all, the previously unnamed full text indexing and search tool now has a name: Beacon. The indexing daemon currently in the works is called beacond. This is what beacond can do right now:
Hi, I’m Ankur Sethi. I’m a first year Information Technology student at Indraprastha University, New Delhi. I will be working on a full text indexing and search application for Haiku Code Drive 2009.
I use Mac OS X as my primary OS. Before I switched to the Mac, I had been an Ubuntu user for four solid years. I first read about Haiku on OSNews back in 2007 (my profile says my account is 1 year 36 weeks old), and I was hooked. What first caught my attention was the incredibly short boot time, and the low resource usage. When I read up more about what Haiku is like under the hood, this is what I thought: WANT (excuse the meme). I’m waiting for the day I can just pop a Haiku install disk into my PC and use Haiku as my primary OS.
