Xapian 1.2
It’s been a long time since I posted here, and there are a lot of recent developments in Xapian to talk about – not least, the release of Xapian 1.2.0, the first in the new stable release series, which brings a lot of new features over the last stable release series (the 1.0 series). Of particular interest in the 1.2 series are things like the ability to get faceted classifications for search results, and to use custom “PostingSource” subclasses to perform custom weighting operations, or to bring in external data to modify the set of matching documents. It also includes a replication framework to allow scaling a search installation horizontally, and a new default backend database format which is considerably smaller on disk, while still storing some additional statistics which are used to optimise the searches further. We’re still working on writing up the full set of changes since the last release in the 1.0 series, which will ultimately appear at http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/ReleaseOverview/1.2.0.
Each of these features deserves a blog post to themselves, and I’ll try and write some of these over the coming weeks, but in the meantime I encourage you to download 1.2.0 and play with the new features.
