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Miscellaneous Tips and Tricks

The following tips and tricks don't fit into the other major categories of this tips guide, so have been collected here.

Working with Large Collections

A frequently asked question regarding XTF is whether it can successfully scale to handle very large collections. The answer is yes, as was shown by a research project undertaken by CDL and funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: The Melvyl Recommender Project. In this project, XTF was shown to work with about 10 million meta-data records, plus over 18,000 full text objects. The total size of the textual part of the input objects was almost 14 gigabytes. So yes, XTF can handle very large collections.

There are some hurdles to overcome when indexing and searching such large collections, which are covered briefly below.

Any additional observations you have with large collections, or additional tips or tricks, would be welcome additions to this section.

AJAX-style XTF Programming

A new generation of interfaces is taking the web by storm, and the technology behind them is AJAX — Asynchronous Java And XML. There's a good reason that AJAX is so popular: it makes user interfaces much more responsive and therefore useful. One might ask, can XTF be used in conjunction with AJAX?

Of course it can. In the default stylesheets that come with XTF, we provide one basic example: fetching similar documents. When the user clicks on this link in a set of crossQuery search results, a small piece of JavaScript asynchronously sends a new query to the servlet, fetching documents similar to the one of interest to the user. When the list comes back, it is inserted directly into the original search results page. If you're interested in the details of this interaction, we encourage you to explore the source code, and if you have questions, post them to the XTF Users discussion list.

One can think of many more ways to combine AJAX and XTF, including book bag functionality, tagging, and improvements to faceted browse. These are beyond the scope of this document, but we hope that more XTF implementors will explore this area.