Here Comes the Sun

Last week, in collaboration with Sun and CollabNet, we loaded the mail archive histories for java.net, Sun's open source developer playground for Java projects and home to projects like GlassFish, jMaki, AppFuse, Grizzly, Hudson and WebWork.

The load includes more than 1,000 mailing lists and roughly 1,000,000 messages. Their growth curve is fantastic (the last month is partial):

Just about half the java.net mails are auto-generated as a result of checkins or bugs. If we remove those, the curve is still beautiful. Looks like people are writing more than 15,000 human-to-human emails every month on java.net.

With such a large community, it's fun to look at community-wide analytics. It's a little-known feature that you can go to our browse page and add an arbitrary query to the URL and it'll show you list-by-list numbers for all messages matching that query. For example, you can view the total number of messages per list throughout time, or the counts for just last week.

You can browse the lists where people from "sun.com" have written the most. If you want to see the top lists, do it as a regular search.

There's been a lot of coverage about this, from Marla Parker, Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart, Clark Richey, and javaHispano. Plus we issued our own press release!

A Tale of Two Search Engines

If you're local to the Bay Area, you may be interested in attending an upcoming talk from the SDForum Software Architecture & Modeling SIG on August 27th. It's titled A Tale of Two Search Engines and will be given by our own John Mitchell, one of the developers on MarkMail. Here's his abstract:

Betwixt the rigid structure of relational databases and the unbridled chaos of random content lies the world of search engines. Search engines shine in the middle ground where the messy complexity of reality makes everything harder than we imagine.

While the soap operas of general-purpose search engines dominate the news, specialized search engines are coming to dominate their vertical niches. Special-purpose search engines can aggressively leverage domain-specific intelligence to return highly relevant results.

This talk will present the architecture, implementation, and stories behind the creation of two specialized search engines for code and email: Krugle and MarkMail.

If you're interested in MarkMail I think you'll enjoy it. (And no, John doesn't really use words like "betwixt" in daily conversations.)

The Perl Review: Now with Video

The folks at The Perl Review recently enhanced the interview I mentioned here Monday with a new screencast video showing MarkMail in action. The intro is terrific. There's a guy hitting his Mac with a hammer!

It's a strange (happy) feeling to have others produce advertising videos for you. Thanks, brian d foy!