What's the state of app engine compatibility?
Charlie
It seems like back in 2009 someone did a port of Whoosh to app engine,
but since then Whoosh has been updated significantly. I'm presuming
that the current release doesn't work on app engine without modifying
it again. Is app engine and whoosh a good or bad fit? What's involved
in porting? Might the whoosh architecture be updated to support a
generic backend that would work on app engine?
Thanks.
Matt Chaput
I never really looked into that work on GAE back then, but Whoosh has
changed significantly since then, I'm sure it wouldn't work unmodified.
Obviously, because GAE doesn't allow writing to a filesystem, the
default filedb backend won't be able to index documents dynamically,
however depending on what you're doing you might find an acceptable
workaround is to index on your local machine and upload the files to
your GAE account.
Whoosh is designed for swappable backends, so in theory someone familiar
with the architecture (i.e. me) could write a backend that used GAE's
database API to store the index. I actually started to try recently, but
the whole project quickly foundered because (for me personally) working
with GAE is no fun, and I have no enthusiasm for the platform at all.
So, unfortunately, after some talk on my part about doing something
about it, Whoosh on GAE is nowhere again, unless someone else wants to
take it up. The biggest issues to solve would be (a) figuring out a
performant way to store postings in Google's database, (b) the
assumption in a lot of Whoosh front-end code that documents can be
addressed using monotonically increasing integers, and (c) how to
translate a Whoosh Schema into setup instructions for the GAE database.
Probably not insurmountable, just a bit of grunt work. If anyone's up
for trying, I'll provide all the guidance I can.
Matt