I have been reading about Haystack,Whoosh,Xapian,etc. however I didn't really get what they are exactly used for and what is the relationship between them.
For example, it is said that
Enable searching on third-party apps without touching that app’s code.
Can some explain to me what these are used for maybe giving a nice link and simple enough to understand for a begginer.
thx
Haystack is a different beast from Whoosh/Xapian/etc.:
Haystack provides modular search for Django. It features a unified, familiar API that allows you to plug in different search backends (such as Solr, Whoosh, Xapian, etc.) without having to modify your code.
From the FAQ (emphasis added):
What is Haystack?
Haystack is meant to be a portable interface to a search engine of your choice. Some might call it a search framework, an abstraction layer or what have you. The idea is that you write your search code once and should be able to freely switch between backends as your situation necessitates.
The "search backends" mentioned are search libraries which have their own API. Haystack provides a unified API on top (and independent) of any one specific search library.
Related
I've never really heard of HAL until I started working on a new project that is making use of it. From what I can tell, it's basically a way to easily follow links to traverse your way around a restful API's structure.
So if I understand this correctly, both tools are to make it easier to traverse around an API's documentation to see all the different means of communicating with said API. Essentially both of these are tools used for documentation purposes only?
REST APIs must be hypertext driven. It's not merely for documentation purposes, but for driving all interaction with the API. If you're not driving the interaction through links and clients are building URIs from templates in documentation, it's not RESTful. The authors of Django-REST-Framework themselves recognize the name is inadequate.
http://www.django-rest-framework.org/topics/rest-hypermedia-hateoas/
You should read the links provided in that document, specially this one:
http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven
With that in mind, your REST API has to use a data format where links are standardized so clients know how to parse them. This would constrain most APIs to use HTML or XML, but since JSON is such a popular data-exchange format, there are some efforts into designing conventions for adding hypermedia-awareness to any format, like HAL.
Django-REST-Framework supports hyperlinks in the HTML output, but -- AFAIK -- it has no support for hyperlinks in other formats. You can use HAL-JSON if you want, but you'll have to implement support for it.
I have JSP project which uses Liferay framework. There are default Liferay cookies named COOKIE_SUPPORT and GUEST_LANGUAGE_ID in Liferay. I dont want hackers to view any of my technology information by any means. How can I rename these cookie?
If you want to protect the framework you're using, you won't have to worry about the names of the cookies. Worry about server identification, elements of the DOM, structure and mechanics of URLs, secure&hardened setup of your server, common translations, default content, standard error messages, etc.
In other words: If you don't want to give away, which standard framework you're using (and this is not limited to Liferay) you'll have to roll your own. Good luck with getting this as powerful and as well tested as any standard framework.
Rather worry about keeping your systems updated all the time and protect from well known vulnerabilities in older systems. For hardening Liferay specifically, you might want to start with my blog series on securing Liferay (linking chapter 1 which refers to the other chapters)
Promoting a comment into this answer: One way to find out how to change them is to search for their names in the source code and identify the kind of plugin you need to provide different values - most likely this will be an ext-plugin. After all, Liferay's source is available. I don't see anything short of this.
I'm just wondering what is exactly the functionality that haystack provides and if I need it.
I mean the search and indexing is done by whoosh. As far as I can tell, haystack is just offering ready made views, and forms. If I want to write my own form and views do I still need haystack?
Am I missing something?
P.S. I don't plan to use any other search engine than whoosh so I also don't need haystacks's multiple search engine wrapping.
Besides views, forms and a search engine-agnostic layer, the other powerful thing about Haystack is its ability to map Django models to something the search index understands. Using Haystack, you can easily specify which fields in a model should be indexed and how (see the SearchIndex API - http://django-haystack.readthedocs.org/en/latest/searchindex_api.html).
Once you have done that, you can then leverage the built-in management commands to (re)index your data when required.
It also comes with some nice templatetags to help present search results, like highlighting the matching bits.
Is there a particular reason that you don't want to use Haystack? It is a pretty non-intrusive plugin that lets you use as much of it as you need, and makes it easy to use more advanced functionality when you need it later down the road. In one of the sites I built, I only used the SearchIndex and SearchQuerySet APIs; I built my own views and forms. Ultimately, if you end up writing your own indexing and searching code, views and forms, you have basically re-written a large part of Haystack, in which case, you may want to consider using something that is in use out there and reasonably well tested.
That said, I have rolled my own 'Haystack' like layer in another project, mainly because the data source didn't map to the Django ORM. In that case, I wrote my own indexing scripts, and used PySolr to interface with my Apache Solr instance.
Given that Whoosh is written in Python, I'd assume it has a decent Python interface, so it shouldn't be too hard to do. I would only do it if there's something special about your scenario though.
Are there any capabilities that one inherently lacks that the other doesn't?
SphinxQL (according to benchmarks on the Sphinx blog) returns queries faster than SphinxAPI for interpreted languages and the premise of such a comparison would likely be that the functionalities present in both are the same.
Why the API then?
Any clarity on this issue is much appreciated.
(This is about the C++ based open source search engine)
I just found a satisfactory answer:
SphinxQL is simply a language for querying Sphinx.
SphinxAPI is a framework that allows you to compute results based on the queries.
The queries could still be via SphinxQL or they could be via the API's syntax...it doesn't matter...SphinxQL and the SphinxAPI are different objects that accomplish different things (as highlighted above)
SphinxAPI is a legacy. That is why I'd rather go with a flow with a API than switch to SphinxQL in production. But for new projects SphinxQL is the only choice as it is evolve quicker and gets all features first. The next big thing that using SphinxQL you don't tie to developer of API for not officially supported languages or platform instead you could use any MySQL client \ library.
First, some background information... I'm coming up on a medium-scale website for a non-profit that will require both English and Korean translations. Feature-set includes: CMS for normal content, a blog, some form submission/handling (including CSV/PDF exports), a job posting board, a directory of related businesses and non-profits (that accepts visitor submissions), and a basic (probably blog-driven) newsroom.
I have a fairly strong development background, and I've done some sites using Drupal, built some basic custom CMSes using frameworks like CodeIgniter, and I've recently started getting into Django. These are the primary options that I am exploring, and I would consider using different tools for different portions of the project, but what I'm mainly interested in, is if anyone has any experience to share with regards to localization/internationalization. I haven't yet put together a site that supports multiple languages, so before I get in trouble by underestimating the task, or making poor assumptions, I'd like to get some input to help guide my decision-making process.
Do you have any recommendations for frameworks (Drupal, Django, CodeIgniter) that handle localization/internationalization/translation well for a CMS? I know they all support it, but I'm looking for real-world experience here (or suggestions for modules/plugins given explanations).
Sorry for the longwinded question, but I wanted to be clear as possible. Thanks in advance!
There is a distinction between "site" translation and content translation. Django handles the site translation great, out of the box. The content translation, however, requires making some decisions (there's no one right way at this point). This probably makes sense, because of the very nature of Django as a lower level framework (when compared to something like Drupal, which is intended to serve as a complete CMS).
There are applications for Django which are meant to add this functionality (in the form of translations configured at the model level):
Django-multilingual
Transmeta
Also, I found this question that is related.
The bottom line though, is that this is still being explored in the Django world, and neither approach has been decided upon for the framework. Also, although I haven't used it, Drupal has module support for this in the form of the i18n module.
I will update with more conclusions as I come to them. If you have anything to add about content translation in Django or in Drupal, feel free to add your own answer as well.
You probably already know that the native i18n support in django is quite good. As for translation, you might try the django-rosetta app which allows you to grant translation rights to a subset of users, who are then able to translate through an admin-like interface.
Zend_Translate is pretty comprehensive. And if you decide to use PHP, I suggest you take a look at it. It provides multiple interfaces (e.g. an Array, CSV, Gettext, etc.) to manage your translations, which makes it IMHO unmatched when it comes to PHP.
I'm not sure how well it plays with Drupal, since Drupal is hardly a framework but more a CMS -- or maybe a CMS framework. I'm pretty sure that Drupal either has a thing build in or that there is a plugin for it.
With CodeIgniter you would start from scratch and Zend_Translate plays well with it.
I liked Drupal over Joomla. You should also look into DotNetNuke, out of the box it has lot of things that will meet your needs.
Checkout django-blocks. Has multi-language Menu, Flatpages and even has a simple Shopping Cart!!