ubuntu-appstore-developers team mailing list archive

[James Tait <james.tait@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Time for another update - there's a lot going on!

A lot of the work lately will not be user-visible, hopefully!  We've
been doing some work to allow us to easily experiment with other
back-ends to make sure the service is scalable.


Schema Changes
==============
Categories and Departments have landed.  Package details will contain
the raw data for the category and department fields, which are
searchable in the usual manner.

Publisher details have also landed.  There is a separate publisher
field in the index, which is searchable.  It is populated at index
time and will contain either the company_name or the developer_name.

Package Highlights have been added to the index, but are not currently
being populated in devportal.

API Changes
===========
Phrase Search has been added to the /search endpoint.  Terms enclosed
in "double quotes" will bypass wildcard expansion and whitespace
tokenisation and will be treated as a single term.

Example:
https://search.apps.ubuntu.com/api/v1/search?q=%22internet%20radio%22,architecture:armhf

Multi-framework support has finally landed.  Clients will be able to
send a query with one framework term for each of their supported
frameworks, and the search results will only contain packages whose
required frameworks are a subset of those indicated by the client.

Example:
https://search.apps.ubuntu.com/api/v1/search?q=flappy,architecture:armhf,framework:ubuntu-sdk-13.10,framework:ubuntu-sdk-14.04-dev

Publisher details have been added to both the search and package
responses.

Departments and categories have been added to the package responses.
In addition, we have a new endpoint, /api/v1/departments which will
list the departments used by the packages currently in the index.
Sub-departments are also supported, allowing drill-down searches.

Example: https://search.apps.ubuntu.com/api/v1/departments
         https://search.apps.ubuntu.com/api/v1/departments/Internet
         https://search.apps.ubuntu.com/api/v1/departments/Internet/Chat

Package Highlights have been added at
/api/v1/highlight/:highlight-name which is a first step towards
supporting things like "Most downloaded", "Most popular", "Currently
trending" and similar highlights, though no such highlights currently
exist.

Other News
==========
Robert Schroll posted on Google+ [0] about a nice little script he put
together for navigating the index in your web browser.  Some useful
discussion followed on from that, with some features and feedback to
be considered and incorporated.

We also have the third Ubuntu App Showdown [1] currently underway,
which focuses on creating Click apps using the Ubuntu SDK and
publishing them in the index via MyApps.

The API documentation is on the Ubuntu Wiki [2], and will continue
to be updated as we flesh things out.

Until next time!

JT

[0] http://goo.gl/ea1xS1
[1] http://developer.ubuntu.com/showdown/
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AppStore/Interfaces/ClickPackageIndex
- -- 
James Tait, BSc. | https://launchpad.net/~jamestait/
Software Engineer, Canonical Online Services, Web and Ops Team
Ubuntu - Linux for human beings | www.ubuntu.com
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/

iEYEARECAAYFAlMXAsYACgkQyDo4xMNTLibHPQCgvLToGSg79x8LHLR1rtjhhqLb
4nEAoO6dZb/B3m9jcC49TD7hAUn+WRnU
=znDL
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----