Picky 4.0 Tweet

Picky 4.0 release – a quick description of the goals and the changes from version 3.6.16. More to come later.

Goals

The ultimate goal of Picky is to become THE choice for a lightweight search engine, as flexible as possible, regarding the container on one hand (useable in a script/a Sinatra instance, a DRb server, wherever) and in itself on the other hand, offering a rich API where you plug in search engine behavior.

Release 4.0 is another big step towards these goals.

Thanks

Thanks to all who helped with this release! Among others: Roger Braun, Niko Dittmann, Kaspar Schiess, Glen Maddern.

Changes (tl;dr)

The one big change is that both the classic Picky application and classic Picky sources have been removed. If you need these, please continue using 3.6.16.

If you want to jump on 4.0, replace with a Sinatra app and convert your source into one that responds to #each (See the Wiki on sources).

Other important changes:

• Picky::Index, option weights has been renamed to weight.
• Picky uses the procrastinate gem to parallelize indexing.
• Picky::Indexes.reload => Picky::Indexes.load, analog on Index, Category.
• If you call any define_* methods, please remove the define_ part.
• If you defined a source { with a block }, the block is now evaluated each time the indexer runs on a category.
• Rake task rake index:parallel is used by rake index. If you can’t index in multiple processes, please use rake index:serial.

Detailed Changes

This is for users that are currently on version 3.6.×. Extracted from the history.textile file:

• hanke: (server) BREAKING Picky::Indexes.index does not index in parallel anymore.
• hanke: (server) BREAKING Renamed Picky::Indexes.index_for_tests to Picky::Indexes.index.
• hanke: (server) If you want to explicitly run parallel indexing programmatically, use Picky::Indexes.index Picky::Scheduler.new(parallel: true) or Picky::Indexes[:index_name].index Picky::Scheduler.new(parallel: true).
• hanke: (server) BREAKING Renamed Picky::Wrappers::Category::ExactFirst to Picky::Results::ExactFirst. Extend instead of wrap: index.extend Results::ExactFirst or category.extend Results::ExactFirst. If an index is extended, each category of the index will be extended.
• hanke: (server) BREAKING Picky::Indexes.reload has been renamed to Picky::Indexes.load.
• hanke: (server) BREAKING index.reload has been renamed to index.load.
• hanke: (server) BREAKING category.reload has been renamed to category.load.
• hanke: (server) BREAKING Removed all define_... methods on indexes.
• hanke: (server) BREAKING Removed Picky classic application. Please use Picky e.g. in a Sinatra app.
• hanke: (server) BREAKING Removed Picky classic sources. Please use a source with the #each method.
• hanke: (server) BREAKING Option weights for the Picky::Index#category method has been renamed weight to conform with the other methods.
• hanke: (server) BREAKING Picky does not require the text gem anymore by default. Only when you use phonetic similarity. It will tell you what it needs.
• hanke: (server) BREAKING Added the PICKY_ENVIRONMENT in front of the Redis key namespace to differentiate the various environments.
• hanke: (server) BREAKING Removed rake routes since only the classic server was able to provide it.
• hanke: (server) BREAKING Removed the classic server from the generators.
• hanke: (server) BREAKING Reverting customizeable backends from version 3.3.2. They are no longer available. Please use simple subclassing to achieve funky backends.
• hanke: (server) BREAKING SQLite self_indexed and Redis immediate option is now called realtime, as changes go directly through to the actual backends, in “realtime”.
• hanke: (server) BREAKING The tokenizer option for a category has been renamed to indexing, to conform with the methods for the index and the sinatra app.
• hanke: (server) BREAKING Internal Similarity#encoded method has been renamed to #encode.
• hanke: (statistics) Overhauled statistics interface. Use picky statistics log/search.log to start it.
• hanke: (server) The Index#source block is now evaluated every time an indexer runs.
• hanke: (server) Explicitly uses Yajl::Encoder#encode for JSON encoding.
• hanke: (server) Fixed cases where even when no similarity was defined on a category, similar results were still found.
• hanke: (server) Rake task index now points to task index:parallel by default. Call rake:serial to index serially.
• hanke: (server) Indexer calls reconnect! on sources that support it.
• hanke: (server) Location/Volumetric/Geosearch rewritten.
• hanke: (generators) Fixed integration specs for the generated “all in one” server/client.
• hanke: (generators) Changed method calls to adapt to above changes.
• hanke: (server) Using the procrastinate gem to parallelize indexing.
• hanke: (server) Indexing call structure cleaned up. Improves performance by about 40%.

Next Picky APIs

Share

Tweet

Previous Picky Search Performance (Backends)

Comments?