[ABE.pm] Re: [Lvlug] Programming Project, maybe in Ruby

[Randy Kramer]

On Tue, 7 Dec 2004 22:12:12 -0500, Ricardo SIGNES
<rjbs-lvlug at lists.manxome.org> wrote:
> I'm still not clear what this is.  It looks, to me, like a wildly
> over-engineered system for attaching metadata to anything and then
> searching for it.
> 
> So, you need:
> 
>         a metadata indexing system
>         for each kind of thing:
>                 a viewer
>                 an indexer
> 
> The system crawls your data, indexing new things when possible.  When
> you search, it searches the big central database and gives you a big
> unified description of what's there, using the plugged in viewers.
> 
> Is that about right?

That's closer to a description (perhaps) of ZyIndex, although neither
it nor askSam rely on (or even use) a search on metadata.  (At least
in the way I normally think of metadata--however if a "record"
consists primarily of a picture (or some other non-textual thing), I
guess the name of the picture (file) is metadata, and any descriptive
text in that record could be considered metadata.)

I never considered either ZyIndex or askSam (or almost any
(mainstream) software application that I can recall) "over-engineered"
-- usually they are under-engineered, but perhaps over-featured,
over-reaching, or something similar. ;-)

I know that the project I'm considering is not over-engineered -- it
isn't engineered at all, yet. ;-)

> It would be pretty simple in Perl, using, say, Plucene.  I imagine there
> are indexing systems for other languages, too.

I'm sure you're right (even for my application), but I've tried Perl,
and  just can't / won't hack it.  Python gave me some renewed faith in
programming languages (and my ability to program), and I'm told that
Ruby is even better.

regards,
Randy Kramer