The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

Integration questions

I work on a web based Servlet/JSP app running on tomcat.
We are trying to search external document repositories on the LAN of the users where the system will be used.
The windows XP indexing service and SQLServer combined can search through external documents which are shared on the LAN.
But for doing that we have to create a catalog, add external directories to search on the catalog, create a linkedserver from the catalog, and then create a SQL statement using the SCOPE and Contains keywords.
All can be done manully well.We want to do it programmatically on the server side,by automating these steps.There is Win32/COM code to do all this stuff, but anybody have any ideas on integration issues? We have to make OS calls for the XP indesing service, and then run them server side.
Does using something like JNDI make sense here?

Sumit
Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Good God man... use DocSearcher. I know the lead developer and it's been deployed in two major US Gov agencies.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/docsearcher/

KC
Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Oh yeah, and it's Java based and currently works with both JBoss & Jetty. I was working on a tweak for Tomcat, but that fell by the wayside quite a while ago...

KC
Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Do you mean "JNI" (Java Native Interface) instead of JNDI? If I were you, I would avoid JNI.

Listen to KC, this is a common problem so someone else has probably done this and might even be generous enough to give it to you for free.

Bill Rushmore
Wednesday, May 26, 2004

After checking out the DocSearcher page (haven't done that in a while), I see that the Tomcat version is there and functional.

I've used it with 900+MB repositories and John (lead developer) ahs used it successfully on 140+GB.

Don't reinvent the wheel.

KC
Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Just tried to install Docsearcher. Is there any installation pages or help files, just refuses to run on Windows with the error:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: java/nio/channels/Wri
tableByteChannel

Matthew Lock
Thursday, May 27, 2004

Ah, it works after installing latest JVM. Kewl.

Matthew Lock
Thursday, May 27, 2004

Glad I can be of service.

Though he obviously doesn't require it, the DocSearcher crew likes to be able to tout where it has been successfully deployed.

KC
Thursday, May 27, 2004

Just finished indexing all my hard disk with DocSearcher. It's amazing how much useful information you can find on your hard disk once you can search it.

Matthew Lock
Thursday, May 27, 2004