David, This is great news! I too am interested in the relationship between backstage and longwell-csi. I presume you'll be suggesting migration paths from one to the other? do you intend for backstage to have the same kind of timeline support as is present in exhibit2.0 ?
I will follow your explanations of the inner workings of backstage with interest. Great work! Best, Jon On Thu, 7 Feb 2008, David Huynh wrote: > 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 > _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
