Xappy
The "xappy" python module is an easy-to-use interface to the Xapian search engine. Xapian provides a low level interface, dealing with terms and documents, but not really worrying about where terms come from, or how to build searches to match the way in which data has been indexed. In contrast, "xappy" allows you to design a field structure, specifying what kind of information is held in particular fields, and then uses this field structure to index data appropriately, and to build and perform searches.
Xappy is not yet stable - in particular, both the API and database format will change in future releases. If you wish to use it, we recommend that you subscribe to the xappy-discuss mailing list to keep up-to-date with changes to xappy.
Download
The latest release of Xappy is release 0.5 - see the link on the right to get it. Xappy 0.5 requires Xapian 1.0.6 or later to be installed (see http://xapian.org).
Some of the features in Xappy (specifically facet and tag support) require a more recent version of Xapian - in fact, they require changes which aren't yet even on the HEAD of Xapian. These should be included in the 1.1.0 release of Xapian, but if you need them in the meantime, there are tarballs available at http://code.google.com/p/xappy/downloads/list which contain the necessary features. If you attempt to use these features with a version of Xapian which doesn't have the necessary support, you will get an exception with an explanatory message.
Developers are also welcome to check out our sources from SVN (see the "Source" tab).
License
Xappy is currently licensed under the GPL, version 2. In future, it is possible that the license will be changed to the LGPL, but this is dependent on a corresponding change to the underlying Xapian library, which will not happen in the near future.
Developers
Xappy is being developed by Lemur Consulting Ltd, but contributions from third parties are welcome. Contributions will only be accepted if they are licensed under the LGPL, or have copyright assigned to Lemur Consulting Ltd.
Lemur Consulting also contribute to the development of Xapian, the search engine library used as the basis of Xappy, and to Flax, an enterprise search engine built on top of Xappy.
Mailing lists
There is a mailing list dedicated to discussion of Xappy: it is called xappy-discuss and is hosted by Google groups. You must be subscribed to the list to post to it.
There is an automated mailing list which tracks all changes made to the Xappy code and wiki, and all comments in the issue tracker. This is probably only of interest to developers working directly on the Xappy code: it is called xappy-changes and is hosted by Google groups. It is a read-only list.
History
Until September 2007, Xappy was called "Secore". It never had any official releases under this name, however. The Xappy developers also developed an alternative implementation of a Python abstraction layer on top of Xapian before Xappy: this was called PyXapian. We recommend use of Xappy instead of PyXapian for all new projects (and will be providing an compatibility layer in future to enable migration of PyXapian projects to Xappy).
