root/swish_website/src/news.html

[%  META
        title   = 'News'
        id      = 'news'
        type    = 'html'
        author  = '$Author$'
%]


<h1 id="news">News</h1>

<h3>November 13, 2007 - The State of Swish-e</h3>

<p>
It's been nearly a year since the last official release.
Lest folks think Swish-e is just gathering dust we thought we would
do a little "state of the project" summary to get folks up to speed on
where we are.
</p>

<p>
There are currently 4 people regularly contributing to Swish-e. Bill Moseley
is the project leader; David Norris handles all the Windows builds; Jose Ruiz
has been working on the 2.6 branch; and Peter Karman has been working on the
3.0 version.
</p>

<h4>The 2.6 branch</h4>
<p>
As documented on the <a href="/devel/">development page</a>, the 2.6 version
of Swish-e will offer a stable incremental index format and deprecate several features
of the 2.4 branch. You can <a href="http://svn.swish-e.org/swish-e/branches/2.6/">
check out the 2.6 branch from the Subversion repository</a> to see our progress.
The 2.6 branch uses the Berkeley database for storage. There is currently no timeline
for when an official 2.6 release will happen.
</p>

<h4>Version 3.0</h4>
<p>Peter has been working on the next major version of Swish-e in fits and starts
for a couple of years. Version 3.0 marks a significant change in the architecture
and will support Unicode and offer a variety of backend storage formats. See the
<a href="/devel/">development page</a> and <a href="http://dev.swish-e.org/wiki/swish3">the
development wiki</a> for more details.
</p>

<h4>How you can help</h4>
<p>
Version 3.0 is at the point where several API decisions need to be made. Even if you
don't code in C, you can contribute by:

 <ul>
  <li>reviewing the existing documentation</li>
  <li>testing the existing code to see if it builds correctly (passes tests)
  in your local environment</li>
  <li>contributing tests</li>
 </ul>
 
</p>


<h3>January 22, 2007 - Swish-e Release 2.4.5</h3>

<p>
This is a maintenance release to fix a few small bugs.
Please see the CHANGES file for information.
</p>
<p>
<em>This release was announced on Jan 29, 2007</em>
</p>


<h3>October 11, 2006 - Swish-e Release 2.4.4</h3>

<p>After almost two years, Swish-e 2.4.4 is now available on the Swish-e [%
link_to_page('download') %] page.  Please see [% link_to_page('docs', '2.4.4
documentation') %] for details of this release.  2.4.4 includes a few new
features, bug fixes, and documentation updates.  Please review the [%
link_to_page('changes') %] file before upgrading.  </p>

<p>Verson 2.4.x includes a redesigned [%link_to_page('swish-library')%] and an
associated Perl module [%link_to_page('api','SWISH::API')%].  Please review the
documentation before updating if you are using the old SWISH.pm Perl module or
the pre-2.4.0 C interface to Swish-e.  This will not effect most existing users
of Swish-e.
</p>

<h3>Feb 3, 2005</h3>

    <p>
    New site unveiled!
    </p>

<h3>December 09, 2004 - Swish-e Release 2.4.3</h3>

<p>This is old news, now</p>



<h3>Dec 8, 2004</h3>
<p>
    Official spelling arbitrarily and undemocratically decided.
    It's <strong>Swish-e</strong>, not SWISH-E, swish-e, or SWISH-Enhanced.
    Usage will be fixed as discovered.
</p>


<h3>Dec 3, 2004</h3>
<p>
    [% link_to_page('download', 'Version 2.4.3pr1') %] is now available.
</p>


<h3>May 4, 2004 - Swish-e at USENIX and YAPC::NA</h3>

<p>
Josh Rabinowitz made a <a href="http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix04/tech/sigs.html/">presentation</a>
about Swish-e at this
summer's <a href="http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix04/">USENIX Annual Technical Conference</a>
in Boston on July 1st,
and <a href="http://www.yapc.org/America/talk_desc.shtml#26">also</a> at the
<a href="http://www.yapc.org/America/">Yet Another Perl Conference</a> in Buffalo, New York on
June 18th.
</p>

<p>
From Josh's talk description:
"Perl's text handling prowess coupled with Swish-e's special features
and perl API provide a substantial and robust system upon which to
build searching systems. In this talk we'll cover Swish-e core
concepts and we'll also discuss non-trivial real world examples
including Sman, a real-world open source project that uses Swish-e
and perl to provide an enhanced version of 'man -k' and 'apropos'
(see <a href='http://joshr.com/src/sman/'>http://joshr.com/src/sman/</a>, it will likely appear on CPAN before
long), and 'swished', a mod_perl-based concurrent and persistent
swish-e server written by Josh and to be open sourced around the time
of conference. Such a server has long been on the Swish-e "to do"
list. We'll also compare MySQL4's Full Text Search with Swish-e
indices interms of features and performance, with graphs of the
relative responsetime for the two indexing mechanisms when tested
under various size indices, queries, and numbers of concurrent
searches." More info on the talks can be found here:
<a href="http://joshr.com/html/articles_by_joshr.html">http://joshr.com/html/articles_by_joshr.html</a>.
</p>