V7 beta release available for testing

[phoenix1977]

Hello,

any news about date of release v7?

[David]

Since this post back in May we have been working (full time) to

A) Split up the product into the 'engine' and the User Interface (UI)

B) Port the engine to both Linux and Mac (but have the same code base on all 3 operating systems)

C) Make a new native Mac UI and a new Linux UI. It is hard to make good cross platform UI from the same code base. So we'll have multiple new code based for each UI.

The split step is pretty much done, but porting the code to Linux is taking much longer than expected. In theory Mac, Linux and Windows all support C/C++ and the port should be trivial. In practice however there are huge differences in things like Unicode support and HTTP protocol support. So it is turning out to be a significant re-write. We are hoping the engine will be running on Linux next week some time. But we have been thinking this for a few weeks now.

[David]

A progress update 13/Dec/2012:

The engine is now split off and compiling & running on Linux, (as well as Windows as it always did). We also have a very very basic user interface up an running in a browser using PHP/AJAX.

We are able to index several thousand pages on Linux but there are still bugs making it unstable on Linux. Meaning that it crashes from time to time. The issues at the moment mainly revolve around 2 areas,
1) Multiple threads, which provoke more crashes.
2) Linux's very poor support for double byte Unicode.

Windows tends to use double byte Unicode for everything, while Linux tends to use UTF-8. This creates big problems when you are trying to move things like multi-lingual configuration files between platforms. But we are working through these issues as we come to them.

Now that it compiles on Linux, getting the engine to compile on the Mac shouldn't be too hard. But we are going to get it stable on Linux before moving to the Mac.

Still plenty of work to be done.
Q2 2013 is probably the most likely period for the final release.

[zoomin]

Greetings, I'm planning to purchase Zoom Search Engine soon and am debating between whether to start with V7 Alpha or just start with V6 and wait for the full release of V7. I'm currently trying out the Free edition of V6 on a Windows 7 computer, with the website portion being on a Apache server, using the PHP search code. Can you give me any input on the current stability of V7 for use in the above platforms, as well as any known issues? Any downsides or cautions you can offer regarding using V7 Alpha at this point in time would be welcome as well.

Thanks!

[David]

We have been running the V7 alpha release for a couple of months without any problems on our site,
http://www.wrensoft.com/search.php
So it should be pretty stable on Windows.

Should you find any bugs in V7, we'll get them fixed pretty fast. Whereas we have stopped development on V6 now.

It would expect a few more problems when we make the first Linux and Mac releases available however.

[zoomin]

So it should be pretty stable on Windows. Should you find any bugs in V7, we'll get them fixed pretty fast.

That's great--Thanks! Exactly what I was hoping to hear!

[Eagle_f91]

Are there any plans on making an ASP.Net version or CGI version that will work on Azure? I know that since Azure now supports PHP that is an option (which is what I will be using with my version 6) but it would be nice to have ASP.Net support.

[David]

We already have both a ASP.Net version and and a CGI version in V6 of the software.

We haven't looked at Azure in detail, so I don't know the details about what (if anything) is stopping you using what is already available.

[Eagle_f91]

We already have both a ASP.Net version and and a CGI version in V6 of the software.

We haven't looked at Azure in detail, so I don't know the details about what (if anything) is stopping you using what is already available.

What was stopping me was having to isntall the control with an msi file but i have found a workaround for it that will work for any shard hosting or virtual hosting platform including Azure. I just sent you an email explaining how I was able toget v6 working on Azure. I am now going to start testing v7 out in Azura

[Eagle_f91]

We already have both a ASP.Net version and and a CGI version in V6 of the software.

We haven't looked at Azure in detail, so I don't know the details about what (if anything) is stopping you using what is already available.

What stops people from using the system currently is that you have to install something server side. This would work in Azure VMs but not in the shared platform but I was able to figure out an alternate way of getting V6 working in the shared platform. I have sent you an email with information about this to share with your users and add to your manual. This weekend I will start testing it out with V7 but the method should work just the same and it should also work with other shared platforms hosts, not just Azure.

[tommyk]

Hi, ray

great feature the Auto complete serach box...

and I see now is possible to use the wildcard type so i can serach wre*oft or wren??ft... I want the possibility now to indicate the error range like a number of 2 or 3 that indicate the error of ?? like fuzzy search heheheh

And now Ray it's time...to build an APP for android,Ios,windows phone for access file by a repository in a NAS or HD server, with a UI specifically based with a tree folder and a search box no!?

byez and good work

[toby]

Hi,

are there any release dates yet?

[Ray]

We think the second quarter of 2013 is the most likely release date at this point.

Porting the indexer to Linux and Mac has been a major effort. We have had to restructure and re-modularize the indexer code to allow it to compile on these very different platforms, and deal with the various unforeseeable problems as they pop up (even code that compiles on different platforms may behave slightly differently).

There is also some benefit for our regular Windows-based users from all this restructuring -- the fine combing of code during all this allowed us to make improvements which gained us some significant indexing speed over the previous code. We also hope to optimize things for each platform and we'll do some new indexing benchmarks then.

[toby]

Great to hear about the positive progress & evolvement of your software! As I only use Windows (CGI-search), do you recommend to go w/ the current beta or isn't this version production ready? Are there any caveats?

[Ray]

If there is a feature that you want right now, you're free to play with the V7 alpha. For example there's the new autocomplete feature which is quite popular. You can also let us know if you have any trouble and we can try to address them.

But we recommend keeping a backup of your V6 data, your old configuration file, and any modifications (such as language files or scripts), so you can do a rollback to the old version should a problem come up with your particular scenario.

If stability is of utmost concern, and there isn't any pressing need for any of the current new features, we would recommend waiting for the final V7 release.