Building an Autocompletion on GWT with RPC, ContextListener and a Suggest Tree: Part 0
René Pickhardt has started a series of posts that should interest anyone with search applications (or an interest metal bands).
From the post:
Over the last weeks there was quite some quality programming time for me. First of all I built some indices on the typology data base in which way I was able to increase the retrieval speed of typology by a factor of over 1000 which is something that rarely happens in computer science. I will blog about this soon. But heaving those techniques at hand I also used them to built a better auto completion for the search function of my online social network metalcon.de.
The search functionality is not deployed to the real site yet. But on the demo page you can find a demo showing how the completion is helping you typing. Right now the network requests are faster than google search (which I admit it is quite easy if you only have to handle a request a second and also have a much smaller concept space). Still I was amazed by the ease and beauty of the program and the fact that the suggestions for autocompletion are actually more accurate than our current data base search. So feel free to have a look at the demo:
http://gwt.metalcon.de/GWT-Modelling/#AutoCompletionTest
Right now it consists of about 150 thousand concepts which come from 4 different data sources (Metal Bands, Metal records, Tracks and Germen venues for Heavy metal) I am pretty sure that increasing the size of the concept space by 2 orders of magnitude should not be a problem. And if everything works out fine I will be able to test this hypothesis on my joint project related work which will have a data base with at least 1 mio. concepts that need to be autocompleted.
Well, I must admit that 150,000 concepts sounds a bit “lite” for heavy metal but then being an admirer of the same, that comes as no real surprise. 😉
Still, it also sounds like a very good starting place.
Enjoy!