[ajug-members] Autonomy?

[Robert Watkins]

Vincent --

I can speak to a small part of Autonomy's offering, at least
peripherally. For some time we used Verity's search products, the latest
of which was K2. Autonomy bought Verity and took over development and
support of K2. The version of K2 we use is 5.0.1 and is pre-Autonomy,
so I can't say what Autonomy has done since that version. Note, however,
our house has a massive infrastructure project underway (on which I serve
as lead developer) to migrate from K2 (and all the legacy versions of
Verity's products still in use) to Lucene. The move was in large part
motivated by a lack of response from Verity and the exorbitant cost of
the support license (i.e. not getting what you're paying for). Autonomy's
support may well be a very different matter.

That said, from a purely technical perspective I was never happy with
K2. Rather than being a well thought out Java API it felt very much like
a Java wrapper around Verity's core pre-K2 product, VDK, a C++ library
for their C++ search backend. I strongly suspect that the C++
implementation was still at the core of the K2 product. While the
product "works" for the most part, holes start to appear when you try to
do very complex things with the API. I found methods that were simply
not implemented (a fact not mentioned in the documentation but gleaned
from experience) and others that were implemented in an extremely
no-intuitive manner. One I remember was that a particular service's
controller class had a method getStatus(): this did not in fact return
the status of the service but just the status in the config file that
the service read on startup: if the service were down getStatus() would
still happily report the config status -- to get the actual status of
the service you would have to use the admin API to look at it from a
different perspective. Again, this was not documented but discovered
through trial and error (mostly error!).

I must stress that it's possible that Autonomy has fixed all of this,
but I would at least start from a position of skepticism.

-- Robert

On Mon, 6 Aug 2007, Vincent wrote:

> Anyone familiar with their products? Our company will be using some
> of their products and they do support java, XML, C and other  APIs.
> Reading through some of the docs (which may be old) , the only open
> source servlet container listed as being supported is Resin 2.x!
> They also mention j2ee 1.3 and servlet spec 2.2. I know that those
> technologies are not that old (in real years) but I'm starting to wonder
> just how retro I'm going to have to go. So if you know, please let me
> know as well.
> Thanks,
> Vincent
> AIM: xaymaca2020
>
> -- 
> The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.
> -William Gibson
>