For Mix07 in London this week I created a sample site search to illustrate creating your own site search engine using the Live Search API. I've posted the sample code here, along with some notes on implementation (including a couple features I didn't have time to finish).

Here's a quick list of the features covered:

• Spelling corrections
• Web search results
• Image search results
• OpenSearch 1.1 (Putting your search in the browser searchbox)
• Live Search Macros

A really handy feature for web-based data tools is ability to let your users download their data in a CSV format so they can edit it in Excel or their favorite spread sheet program. Fortunately this is also really simple to code:

This is a web-based tool for biologist to search our catalog of chromosomes for specific genetic sequences. It also supports plug-ins which can search for variations or meta-data for the specific sequences.

The framework is written in C++ and uses CGI to interact with the browser. It is a little uncommon (and painful) to see a CGI application written in C++, but I chose this setup because I wanted to build a plug-in architecture so that the basic engine could be extended indefinably with new search algorithms. And future engineers wouldn’t have to keep reinventing the UI. And I wanted it to be really fast. Although the final architecture is very flexible and extensible, I never really found a good solution for the plug-in architecture, e.g. runtime binding of additional libraries. What I came up with was a plug-in model using abstract virtual classes. You could easily write your own plug-ins, but to deploy them you needed to recompile the main application and redeploy all the code. And it turns out, no one really wants to do that.

Files:

• Overview: Basic, Detailed
• Design Document
• Source Code
• Plug-in Module SDK
• Example Plug-in: Proximals Module

Simple program written in Java to scan a FASTA file from NCBI for complete, partial and complementary palendrome patterns. It also outputs an easy-to-read HTML file with the results. 

• Palendrome.java - source in Java