ShellSink Server Upgrade

On the same day that our government gets an upgrade, ShellSink gets an upgrade. Specifically, a new version of the server is live! The changes are all performance related and it enables me to bring the client behavior into line with the way google has designed app engine to scale. That is, to make lots of very simple requests instead of fewer complex requests.

Unfortunately, this version is not backwards compatible with older versions of the client. You must upgrade your client! Why would I make such a drastic change? Simple, nobody is using shell_sink but me! That means I'm sure 100% of my users will upgrade. It doesn't explain why I need a blog entry to tell myself about it.

Why search terms are restricted.

Currently you can only search for two keywords at a time. Shellsink uses Google App Engine (GAE) as the underlying technology. The keyword search implementation provided by GAE is currently quite limited. There is: no substring matching, limited number of keywords and only fields of 500 characters or less are indexable. I know. It is a bummer. Unfortunately, search is a complex problem and I don't have the brains to solve it. I'm going to wait for google to solve it. I predict later versions of the App Engine APIs will improve the search functionality and I look forward to removing these limitations just as soon as Google does.