Simon Willison’s Weblog

Sphinx 0.9.9-rc2 is out. Interesting new feature: the Sphinx search server now supports the MySQL binary protocol, so you can talk to it using a regular MySQL client library and fire off search queries using SELECT syntax and the new SphinxQL query language.

# 1:59 pm / full-text-search, mysql, search, sphinx-search, sql

App Engine: Scheduled Tasks With Cron. Cron tasks simply hit a URL on your application, and can be run as frequently as once a minute. They made up their own syntax, which much nicer than traditional unix cron.

# 2:04 pm / appengine, cron, google, googleappengine

Dynamic languages on Google App Engine—an overview. Ola Bini’s notes on exploring the new Java support for App Engine with the aim of getting JVM dynamic languages such as JRuby running. Restrictions include a complete lack of threads (which will make it hard to get Scala up and running), but JRuby trunk now works without modification.

# 2:08 pm / appengine, google, java, jruby, jvm, olabini