"A number of search engines are available for the Gnome and KDE desktop environments, many based around the open source Lucene search engine. It would be tremendous if we could adopt one of these search engines for the Gnome platform, so we can provide the type of integrated search experience for our users that they really need, irrespective of which distort they are using. So to help in this assessment we have carried out a comparison of four different Unix based indexers [.pdf]."
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-07
well, it's written by a sun (Java lovers, duh) guy. so it makes sense he doesn't trash mono and JIndex too much, even tough they clearly suck in terms of performance and memory usage...
if they would make a smart choice, they would go for the best performance and least dependencies - strigi 
Member since:2005-07-13
so it makes sense he doesn't trash mono and JIndex too much, even tough they clearly suck in terms of performance and memory usage...
I could never for the life of me understand why the decision was made to use mono as a framework for beagle, something intended to run as a transparent background service. That's not really a slag against mono per se, it's just a question of whether it makes sense to use it for something that should by design be fast and light. In fact Novell compounded this mistake by using mono for zen as well, which led to much of the griping and complaints with SL 10.1 and how slow and freaking unstable the package management was.
Not sure I understand why Sun is making the same mistake with Java either, aside from the obvious. I guess in a way it does provide a benchmark for optimizing the performance of an app like this to accomodate the overhead costs etc. but still...
I've played with Strigi, and I do like the fact that you never "feel" it running. That's how it should be. I don't care if it's spiking my CPU when my system is idle, as long as I get my juice back the moment I need to do something else. The cool thing is that the core engine seems to be pretty much worked through, now it's just further optimizing and building the hooks and plugins. Collaboration with the tracker team on unified interfaces would be fantastic.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-07
For some reason Beagle lost points for being written in C# and needing Mono, but JIndex didn't lose points for being written in Java and requiring a jvm.
I guess the summaries have been written by different authors and haven't been synchronized prior to publication.
For example the Strigi summary lists "not clear ANSI C" as a cons(begin written in C++), which cleary also applies to the the programs written in C# and Java
I found it odd that obviously only Strigi needs a build framework while all other projects seem to deliver hand written make files. I would have expected that Tracker would be using autotools and the Java application something like Ant.
Member since:
2005-07-06
For some reason Beagle lost points for being written in C# and needing Mono, but JIndex didn't lose points for being written in Java and requiring a jvm.
Preferences aside, that seems a bit odd.