pcplantdb

[Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>]

So there's this new tool out that I've been calling eden.  Right now
it is only an interface to the PFAF dataset, but I'm quite pleased
with it.  You can test a live version at <http://galatea.org/eden>.  I
plan to have an alpha version code release available before I leave for
Thanksgiving.

I'm going to blab on about some of it's design and features now.  In
order to achieve the level of abstraction necessary, I developed in
parallel a text CLI and web/html interface.  Internally all of the
data is represented in an xml affectionately known as kfml and then
parsed to text or html based on the client.  To increase performance
pages are cached [at the client level] based on input.  The search
engine has been improved.  It can search the entire PFAF dataset from
a single string doing substring matches in all name columns (fuzzy
spelling), and has a vocabulary of 130+ words that could increase to
thousands with little performance loss.  Just try it.

Missing: multimedia support, authoring tools including a kfml
dtd/validator, documentation, preferences via cookies and dotfiles,
and on...

If you can get python2.3, python-MySQLdb-0.9.2, and MySQL>=3.23.54
running on your computer you can play with it at home.  If you are
running GNU/Linux or *BSD you probably already have these.  Apache
isn't necessary because python can *serve* itself ;-)

-- 
Chad Knepp
perl -e 'print pack"H*","7079674067616c617465612e6f72670a"'