Beagle Newsletter 10 January 2006

[Joe Gasiorek <joe gasiorek gmail com>]

Beagle Newsletter - 10 January 2006

Welcome to another edition of the Beagle Newsletter.  If you're new to
the project you can read up about it on our website:
http://www.beagle-project.org

Hacking
----

While much work has been done stabilizing the Beagle core
a few new ways to search Beagle have come into existence:

   Holmes - The new Beagle search interface has been
   uploaded to CVS.  The application was started with an
   initial hackfest organized by Lukas Likpa based up on
   mockups done by Garrett LeSage and Jakub Steiner.
   Dan Winship has continued to work on Holmes throughout
   the fall making it even better.  Check it out of GNOME CVS
   under the module "holmes".

   Deskbar Applet - One of modules proposed for the inclusion
   of GNOME 2.14 is the deskbar applet.  The panel applet allows
   users to search a variety of backends right from their panel.
   There has been talk of a backend that would use Beagle to
   provide search results.

   Nautilus - The GNOME file manager has recently had its
   search capabilities upgraded to allow for different backends.
   Anders Carlsson initially worked on this feature upon which Joe
   Shaw extended its Beagle support.  Recently Alex Larsson has
   adapted this which you can read about on his blog:    
http://blogs.gnome.org/view/alexl/2005/12/07/0

   Yelp - The GNOME documentation browser is another application
   that has recently added Beagle support.  Chris Lahey has worked
   on allowing the numerous help pages to be easily indexed and
   searched.

Allowing for the new search interfaces has been possible because
of the new API's that have been created to interact with Beagle.

   pyBeagle - Raphael Slinckx's work has lead to the creation of a
   common way for python scripts to communicate with Beagle.
   One of the more powerful uses could be with the previously
   mentioned Deskbar Applet that was written in python.

   libbeagle - The Beagle C API has finally been put together to
   allow applications written in C to work with Beagle.  After much,
   much work with wonderful help from the community to track
   down bugs, this API ensures Beagle's ability to work with the
   countless applications that have already been written in C
   including the previously mentioned Nautilus and Yelp.

   One of the welcomed side effects of the new search interfaces
   is the improved querying that the Beagle core allows.  Some search
   interfaces, to work as designed, required date range query's or searches
   by extension.  These and more have been built into the Beagle core now.

   Alongside all the work on the search interfaces, their has been
   enormous work on the Beagle Daemon as well.  Reliability upgrades
   and bug fixes have been done to nearly every part of the
   application.  Special thanks go to Jon Trowbridge and Joe Shaw
   for there work, however, it is in part due to the excellent bug
   reports from the community that lead to these problems getting
   fixed.  In addition, Joe Shaw has worked with others to add Firefox
   v1.5 support.


Project
----

Localization
   Since localization support has been added to Beagle,
   numerous contributors have pitched in.  In fact, Beagle
   now supports 27 languages!  Still, if you find something
   that does not look right please help out by submitting a
   patch for a localization fix.

Wiki Cleanups
   Big thanks to David Coeurjolly and Joe Shaw for their work
   in cleaning up the wiki after several malicious attacks.
   The wiki has been upgraded and locked down to provide
   further protection.

New Maintainer
   At the end of 2005 it was announced that Jon Trowbridge, the
   Beagle maintainer since its inception, will be leaving Novell and
   handing the rains of the project to Joe Shaw.  Jon has been a
   wonderful maintainer, guiding the project thus far with remarkable
   skill.  His code has created the base of the Beagle application that
   we all know and love.  Finally it is Jon's overwhelming support of the
   open source philosophy that will aid him at his new job at Google.

As always if you have any input to how the next Beagle Newsletter
should be distributed or what should go in it please email Joe
Gasiorek at joe gasiorek gmail com