There’s been quite a bit of activity in the last month.

• The C++ Xapian example now can search as well as index, and there are Perl equivalents using Search::Xapian checked into svn as well. The C++ code will read/write the swish.xml header; the Perl does not (yet).
• The meta/prop id unique check now uses a hash for quick look up.
• The test suite for libswish3 is totally restructured. Now using Perl’s Test::Harness and added a slew of new meta/prop tests. Alongside that were additions to the NamedBuffer debugging output to print each substring in the buffer.
• Several new string-related utility functions for converting ints to strings and back. Also a new config hash for configration options that use a StringList instead of a simple string.
• Fixed some mem leaks in the example .c programs and added more info to the swish_lint usage() output (including reminders about the various SWISH_DEBUG* env var values).

There are still several parser features yet to be implemented to support the Swish-e 2.4 config options, but those will likely take a backseat to getting a working swish3 Perl script running with SWISH::Prog and SWISH::Prog::Xapian.

I do not use it myself, preferring Perl+Catalyst. But this is an interesting perspective on deployment issues at a major shared hosting provider and as such, is not limited to RoR.

More progress with Swish3.

• There is now a swish_xapian.cpp C++ example for using libswish3 with a Xapian backend. All that is complete is the indexing portion; still TODO is the search part. Still, a significant thing that it was so easy to build a search engine.
• The swish.xml header format is complete and can now read/write the header file. Need to add that part to the swish_xapian.cpp example.
• Squashed some long-standing memory leaks when using the filehandle functions.

Little by little.