The Holumbus Developer

We are pleased to announce the next major release 2.1 of Hayoo!, the Haskell API search engine with find-as-you-type and suggestions.

What’s new?

Thanks to Uwe Schmidt, we have completely revamped the indexer, which now also crawls package information from Hackage. Hence, Hayoo! now  searches package names, package categories, package descriptions etc., too, and shows you some package results along with the functions found (some of you may have noticed this already, since this is live for testing purposes since a few months).

For example, this will find you all packages in the category “Algorithms” that will do something with “sat”:

category:algorithms sat

This will find you some strict datastructures (i.e. synopsis contains “strict” and category contains “data”):

synopsis:strict category:data

As we now have package information present in the search index, the algorithm for ranking the results has been adjusted to mainly depend on reverse package dependencies. Nevertheless, we are still trying to optimize this.

The new indexer also supports incremental index updates, which made a rebuild of the whole infrastructure around it possible. This way, we are now able to provide daily index updates. Useful figures about the current index are shown below the query input field.

Additionally, we have made some optimizations and performance improvements. This allowed us to leverage the restrictions on the query length and hence it is now possible to search for any single character (try searching for “s”).

In the result display, the whole function description is now included and its formatting is preserved. Internally, the HTML rendering part has been completely rewritten, which hopefully allows for faster adoption of new features.

Please let us know about any issues or suggestions. Especially some opinions about how to integrate the package information in the result display would be appreciated.

Hi,

I’ve just released a new bugfix-release of Holumbus-Distribution and Holumbus-MapReduce on Hackage. The build-process was broken, because we are using the type class NFData which was located in the package Parallel, but recently moved to DeepSeq. I hope everything is back to normal and keep on hacking.

We are now attending HaL5 here in Leipzig, Germany and are looking forward to some interesting discussions about Haskell web applications and Haskell in general. While waiting for the first presentation to start, we are trying to fix the occasional crashes of Hayoo! … ;)

Update

We found it! Again, one of these lovely encoding problems depending on the locale of the server machine.

… Hayoo! is back! We found a space leak in the new index code and so the memory of the machine was gone within minutes. This should be fixed by now and hopefully Hayoo! will be more stable again. Thank you for your patience ;)

We are terribly sorry for the recent outages of Hayoo! and the Holumbes website. We were testing some major changes in the Hayoo ! infrastructure which then seemed to have caused some trouble. Actually, we were hoping to reasonably improve response times by switching to Hack and FastCGI, but reverted the latter after it blew up the memory of our machine.

For now, things should be back to normal again and we hope to bring back FastCGI with more speed after some investigation.

After a long year, we have finally managed to upload the new version of Holumbus-Distribution to Hackage.

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/Holumbus-Distribution

Holumbus-Distribution offers distributed data structures like Chan, MVar or functions. These datatypes can be used for inter-process ommunication. With the help of this library it is possible to build Erlang-Style mailboxes for an easy implementation of distributed systems in Haskell.

The following datastructures are implemented so far:

• distributed Chan (DChan)
• distributed MVar (DMVar)
• distributed Functions / RPC (DFunction)
• distributed Values (DValue)
• distributed Streams and Ports (DStream, DPort)

Additional to this, the library offers the possibility to install handlers for watching the existence (of non-existence) of other nodes in your network.

This library was completely rewritten between version 0.0.1 and 0.1.0. The old packages can be found under Holumbus.Network.* while the new ones are located at Holumbus.Distribution.*. The old packages will be removed in future versions (0.2.0).

The wiki is not updated yet, so please refer to the example programs in the package or the git-repository.

We have just deployed a new version of Hayoo!, which now provides a JSON-based webservice API.

Queries may be posted to Hayoo! via this URI:

http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/hayoo/hayoo.json?query=YOUR_QUERY

Search results are returned as JSON encoded string. More details about the structure of the result can be found here.

We would be very happy to see many (web-) applications to include Hayoo! search functionality. Your own creativity is the only limit ;)

If you need help or come across any problems, just drop us a line.

Right now, we are meeting at FH-Wedel for the first Holumbus hackathon and hope to get lots of stuff done. Among other things, hacking on these features is planned:

• JSON-based webservice interface for Hayoo!
• Improving space efficiency on Holumbus index data structures
• Streamlining the Hayoo! indexing process

Stay tuned for updates!

From time to time we are asked how it is possible to link to a specific Hayoo! result.

So here is the answer:

http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/hayoo?query=map

Please note that the argument to the “query” parameter needs to be properly URL encoded (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding for more info).

Santa helped us to update the index again. It now contains 135.940 functions and type definitions. The data and class definitions that were broken in the last index version are now working again.

Ho ho ho!