Beagle+Xesam: Weekly Report

["Arun Raghavan" <arunissatan gmail com>]

Hello Again,
Here's what I've been up to this week:

* Finished a bit more of the skeleton Xesam API support and checked in
the code (it doesn't install yet, but it does make some conversation
with a Xesam client)

* Reading up on XML Schemas and translating the Xesam Search Language
XML schema to English, so that I can then implement the parser to
convert it into query text (as in
http://beagle-project.org/Searching_Data)

That's about it. Here's a little interesting bump we hit with respect
to the events supported by Beagle vs. Xesam. Beagle emits an event
every time a hit is added or removed, and a finished event when
searching (or updating of search results) is done. Xesam, on the other
hand, has events for addition, removal, and _modification_ of hits.
Initially, we thought a HitsModified would instead be a HitsRemoved
followed by a HitsAdded. However, when a HitsAdded event is raised,
the client calls GetHits, and just gets the "n" most relevant hits
(not the "n" newest hits).

For now, what we've done is instead of passing HitsAdded events
directly from Beagle to Xesam, we collect hits till a Finished event
is raised, pass these hits on, then keep them aside. Subsequent
HitsAdded are collected again, and the following GetHits returns only
the new hits. We need to work out whether these semantics are okay at
some point of time.

That's it from me for now ... hope everyone's having a good weekend!
--
Arun Raghavan
(http://nemesis.accosted.net)
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