Neil Ireson wrote: > Hi all, > > My major sticking point with the using Exhibit is the limited number of items > it can handle. I know this is not it's primary purpose, I think David has > said somewhere that it is suited to display between 50-500 items, whilst I > (and I believe others) would be interested in applying the software to 1000s > or even 10000s of items. I know there is Longwell but it is not as simple to > prototype and the interface is just not as intuitive as that in Exhibit.
One 'feature' that we have not extensively made public is an alternative 'hybrid' configuration of longwell that we called "longwell-CSI" where CSI stands for "client-side include". When you start longwell from the command line, use ./longwell -c longwell-csi and you'll see something that looks a lot more like exhibit and performs splendidly for much bigger datasets than exhibit can ever do but allows you to add faceted browsing functionality a-la exhibit in your own HTML pages but having a server-side longwell providing all the querying and indexing (instead of having to do this entirely in the browser and in javascript). We are seriously considering deprecating the standard longwell interface and moving longwell-csi to be the default one, but we haven't made a decision on that yet. Longwell-CSI is a lot easier to adopt and to include in your own web sites, but it still not as flexible as exhibit and relies on Fresnel lenses instead of XHTML+attributes ones like Exhibit does. It's worth noting that David wrote both Longwell-CSI and Exhibit, in that order. > At the moment there seems to be two main constraints on the size of data, > 1) constructing the graph representation and > 2) displaying (rendering) the data > > The construction time does seem to increase somewhat exponentially with data > size and that may impose a current absolute limit on the number of items. > However it is possible to load a data set of over 10000 items if you go and > make a cup of tea and perhaps have some lunch. > The main problem seems to be that Exhibit insists on displaying all the > items, therefore I was wondering if it was possible to: > > 1) paginate the results, there is the ex:showall="false" option but > unfortunately it ceases to work under various conditions and anyway such a > "some or all" option which is of limited use, however I recognise that this > might involve a fair amount of work. > 2) a simpler approach might be to impose some item threshold above which the > exhibit views do not display. This could either mean that only the first n > items are displayed or that (as with Longwell) no items are displayed until > the number of items to display falls below the threshold. One of the issues I personally have with Exhibit is what you list as #1: exhibit takes a long time to stop loading the page and that time grows way more than linearly (I suspect even more than quadratically... but not as bad as exponentially) with the amount of items and item properties. One way to fix this is to 'pre-calculate' the index to avoid Exhibit having to do this each time the page is loaded... but this requires more complicated server-side functionality (or, at the very least, a command line application that can take the exhibit json data file and output the exhibit index file). This doesn't seem like something hard to implement and would ease the pain for people that want to make their exhibits grow at the expense of a little more installation pains. Hope this helps. -- Stefano Mazzocchi Digital Libraries Research Group Research Scientist Massachusetts Institute of Technology E25-131, 77 Massachusetts Ave skype: stefanomazzocchi Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA email: stefanom at mit . edu ------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
