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The need for Xapian will be dropped soon

While writing an E-Mail to Yann I got the idea how to drop the need for Xpaian. Yann did a PHP Wikipedia Offline reader by himself but stopped the project after he found out that there is not bzip2 support in PHP on the iPod Touch/iPhone.

Searching using the new index will be limited to the complete case insensitive title. That’s enough for retrieving the templates. Because of a lot of redirects used by Wikipedia itself it didn’t hurt so much as it sounds.

Some more benefits:

  • The index will be a lot smaller (app. 210 MB instead of 1.7 GB (english version))
  • The 1.4 MB code file of the Xpaian library on the device is no longer needed
  • The 0.8 MB additional libstc++ on the device is also not needed anymore
  • As there is no need for any additional library anymore everything can be packet into one nice iKi.app file (including a nice icon); distribution using the installer is possible and very easy
  • Creating the index is not needing Xapian anymore, can be done in one independent code file which is easy to compile or distribute in binary form; creating a nice GUI app is very simple.

So stay tuned, I’ve just started to implement it.

This entry was posted on Samstag, Januar 12th, 2008 at 21:32 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “The need for Xapian will be dropped soon”

  1. michi Says:
    Januar 12th, 2008 at 22:41

    i’m so excited wiki via installer :-D

  2. alfuncia Says:
    Januar 15th, 2008 at 14:29

    I have tryed to build the solution and install with the Xapian references. Too difficult for me. It Will be nice to drop the Xapian requirements.

  3. tom.haukap Says:
    Januar 15th, 2008 at 21:13

    Michi-

    I’m sorry. But cure is in sight. I’ve removed the need for Xapian and there is now an indexer which is indexing the articles in a fast and convenient way. It’s still using perl and grep so I expect it running a lot faster after these tools are exchanged with cpp code.

    The app for the iPod/iPhone is ready. It’s now only one file which can be placed everywhere on the device. Preferable inside an iKi.app (or so).

    I’ve also uploaded the English edition to my iPod Touch. Some more issues with templates and slower (mostly because of very large articles) but working. After I’ve checked the template processor again I will release this version in the near future.

    -Tom

  4. max Says:
    Januar 17th, 2008 at 19:18

    still waiting for that great app :)

  5. tom.haukap Says:
    Januar 20th, 2008 at 20:19

    Max-

    It’s out and I hope you’re able to get it running.

    -Tom

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