FOSDEM

Modern humans are using more and more data every day. Keeping data organized is becoming insufficient, so finding and filtering documents have become key tasks in modern operating systems. The traditional unix tools find, grep and locate do no longer suffice for a number of reasons: The amounts of data have grown more than data access speeds, many document formats are too complex to handle by simple tools and relations between different types of data are becoming more important for a convenient user experience. Strigi introduces a new way of looking at metadata and file formats that enables the creation of very efficient tools for improving the way users handle their data. It does so by using simple C++ code with very few dependencies.

Strigi's features can be easily integrated by other programs using two different interfaces: socket and DBus. The last one can be considered the best choice since there are lot of DBus bindings that make possible to interact with Strigi using different programming languages. DBus inter-process communication system will be used by KDE4 and is actually used by Gnome. Moreover, DBus bindings exists for lot of programming languages. Thanks to this Strigi can be easily integrated in different window manager and inside programs written in languages different from C++.

KDE developers can also take advantage from Strigi's JStreams: a set of classes for fast access to archive files. In fact Strigi defines a dedicated KIO Slave for JStreams, this can be easily used by other programs, making archives access faster.

This presentation will show how the current Strigi clients interact with the daemon, how to communicate with Strigi and, most important of all, how other projects can benefit too accessing Strigi.