The Future

Well, that was interesting. Whoosh got noticed in a few places, and a few people are playing with it. Now I need to work on three things.

• Documentation
• Finishing features
• Exploring performance

Documentation is what I'm going to be focusing on first, and right away. I think it's awesome that people are trying Whoosh out just based on docstrings and the GettingStarted page, but I really need to write a user guide, get down some design notes, and write about how to accomplish things in Whoosh. It would be cool to do a screencast or something too. But writing documentation is my day job; I need to find motivation to do it in my spare time too.

There are quite a few things that are coded and more-or-less-working-probably (e.g. highlighting search results excerpts) but not perfectly integrated, or wanting a better API. There are also some code I wrote just to get things to a releasable state that I need to revisit. That's what I'll probably work on after getting the documentation going.

Increasing performance is going to be tricky. Given the design parameters, I feel like I'm running up against the speed of the Python interpreter. Finding more performance may mean being extremely clever about doing less work, and exploring parallel processing. I can also try working with very large indexes and see what kind of tunable parameters might help with that.