Just another WordPress site

Tag: google

  • It's SQLite-Mania Time!

    Between the freshly announced Google Gears and the upcoming Firefox 3, I’m really happy to see the SQLite project picking up some massive and forefront industry momentum. And well deserved at that, since I’ve always thought it was an excellent venture in many respects, though often overlooked by the general development community.

    Firefox will use it for their upcoming Places feature, which aims to be the evolution of bookmarks and history.

    Google Gears, on the other hand, uses it for offline web app data storage. I have to say I’m getting a geeky kick out of seeing SQL queries passed directly via client-side Javascript (although as an offline app, I guess the client is the server too). And not even as a WTF post: bonus!

    Kudos to the SQLite dev team, and good call to the two latest industry icons who chose it.

    That install base sure is going to grow fast! Makes me giggle when I remember thinking that every PC would be running at least 6 different embedded copies of the tiny DB within a few years when I first played around with it, all without 99% of the end users even realizing this. I’d say we’re right on track. 🙂

    Who’s taking bets on Adobe doing the same with Apollo?

  • Google@Mcgill

    Yes! We’ve done it. McGill is now using a Google Search Appliance as its main search engine backend, which is the main reason I have been so busy in the last while.

    Despite early hardware issues and a few bugs I faced in the caching engine and XML APIs (most of which have been or are being addressed by the Google Enterprise team), I have to admit that it’s been one of the most motivating and enjoyable projects I have handled at McGill.

    You can try it out for yourself on our main search page.

    We also enabled other areas, such as our advanced course search, and classified search.

    This is of course only the tip of the iceberg, since the architecture is quasi-infinitely extensible through the feeds and OneBox concepts (both of which we already use). And as usual, I already have a head full of ideas on how to further leverage the enormous amount of digital content on campus.

    Fun times ahead!