I have a good news: Sphinx Client API has been updated and now it supports all brand new features of the unstable Sphinx 0.9.8 development snapshot. What does it mean for you as a developer? What features you will get if you would decide to switch to the new version? I will describe most valuable improvements of the Sphinx in this article, and will show how to use them with new Sphinx Client API 0.4.0 r909.

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It’s happened! We all waited for Sphinx update and finally Andrew Aksyonoff has released version 0.9.7 of his wonderful search engine (who does not know about it, look my previous posts here and here).

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Very often I have to implement console scripts (because of my laziness, for boring processes optimization). Many of them write some information to the output, show process status or display results of work. Anyway, it’s very wearisome action to read script output, and I want to highlight most important things: errors in red, successfully finished steps in green color, etc. And it is a case when ANSI escape sequences could help. They are supported by the most terminals, including VT100 (btw, Windows NT family console does not support it, but I will back to this issue later).

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RSpec provides a framework for writing what can be called executable specifications of program behavior. In this short post I want to explain why I use this framework in place of classic TestUnit library.

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Today I found that Sphinx search engine has been updated. Major new features include:

• extended query mode with boolean, field limits, phrases, and proximity support (eg.: @title "hello world"~10 | @body example program);
• extended sorting mode (eg.: @weight DESC @id ASC);
• combined phrase+statistical ranking which takes words frequencies into account (currently in extended mode only);
• official Python API;
• contributed Perl and Ruby APIs.

I have updated Sphinx Client Library along with Sphinx 0.9.7-RC2 Windows build.