I’m trying to build a Quicksilver style search system for the internal web app that we develop at work. There are plenty of examples of really cool front ends for this using JQuery or MooTools or whatever. None of these examples really talk about the back-end. As far as I can tell, these examples assuming the back-end is searching a single table or at least, performing a single query. What I want to do is design a system where you can, literally, type anything at all at it and find what you were looking for. Idealy, I want to be able to just write plugins for this system, drop them in, and start searching.
I have a solution where the back-end uses the observer pattern to send the query to different plugins for each type of search. However, this will return the results from all the plug-ins as one chunk. This could get noticeably slow if there are many kinds of searches. I’d like it to be quick and return the results in a more asynchronous fashion where results are displayed as they come in, a la OS X’s Spotlight or Quicksilver.
Another solution is to write, on the fly, a javascript array with the names of the plug-ins to be used. I could then fire off separate calls to the server with the query, one for each plug-in. Something about this solution seems… off to me. I can’t exactly put my finger on it though.
So, my question is: does anyone have any better solutions for building a plug-in based search system where the individual search types are not known before the page is loaded and the results are returned ASAP?
This does not seem like that bad of an option. It gives you everything you need.
It is not a new solution, but I think that it is the easiest.
Regards.