Very, nice. David,
Outstanding, just can't wait for this to be in production! Btw, I am indeed interested the details of the Backstage api technical inner workings. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Huynh Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 12:49 PM To: General List Subject: scaling up Exhibit - an early experiment 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?autoCre ate=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?backsta ge=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
