Hi all,
Some people have expressed a desire to use Exhibit on larger data sets,
and I have mentioned that there is an effort to address that need. This
is not a trivial engineering effort--it'll take months. But I'd like to
show you a very, very early experiment (codenamed Backstage) to explain
where we're heading.
Point your Firefox browser at:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/dfhuynh/misc/backstage-demo.html
(I will keep this demo up for 1 day only as this is running on my
own development machine.)
Note that there are 2383 items (only 20 are displayed, but the facets
are complete).
Take a look at the HTML source code. You'll see the usual simplicity
found in exhibits' HTML source code. Right now 2 different APIs are included
<script
src="http://static.simile.mit.edu/exhibit/api-2.0/exhibit-api.js?autoCreate=false";></script>
<script
src="http://dfhuynh.csail.mit.edu:8181/backstage/api/backstage-api.js";></script>
The Backstage API consists of Javascript code as well as Java code
running on my machine. In the future, the two APIs will be blended
together so that you'll only need to include exhibit-api.js and set a
flag, e.g.,
<script
src="http://static.simile.mit.edu/exhibit/api-2.0/exhibit-api.js?backstage=true";></script>
But for now, the 2 APIs actually serve to make a point. There are 3
parties involved
- the data comes from wingerz.com
- the configuration of the exhibit comes from people.csail.mit.edu
- the actual computation (think facets) comes from
dfhuynh.csail.mit.edu:8181
This is an advanced form of mash-up where you "borrow" data from one
party (just by linking to it), "delegate" computations to another party,
and tie it all together with some simple HTML code. "Delegation" is done
automatically for you, and those computational resources you get for
free actually include a real database, spawned and configured on the fly
to meet your needs.
The current performance should be better than Exhibit for this data set,
but it has not been optimized, especially for several concurrent users,
and especially because I have an old machine. But it's conceivable that
we'll have a farm of fast machines all running Backstage, to which
exhibits with large data sets can delegate automatically.
(I can explain the inner technical workings of Backstage in a subsequent
email if anyone is interested to know.)
Cheers,
David
_______________________________________________
General mailing list
[email protected]
http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
