Archive - February 2018

Full Text Search: How it Works

What is full text search?

Full text search is a technique, which allows conducting search through documents and databases not only by a title, but also by content. Unlike metadata search methods, which analyze only the description of the document, full text search goes through all the words in the document, showing information that is more relevant or the exact information that was requested.
The technique gained its popularity in 1990’s. At that time the process of scanning was very long and time-consuming, so it was optimized.
Full text search engines are used widely. For example, Google allows users to find the neeeded query on web pages particularly with the help of this technique. If you have your own website with a lot of data, applying full text search might be very useful because it eases interaction for a user.
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async/await syntax encourages frontend developers to develop incorrect code

await operator is an incredible new feature in ECMAScript 2017. There are many articles demonstrating how much you can benefit from it. I agree: asynchronous code was never so brief and clear as when it is written via async/await syntax.

Nevertheless, there is a significant pitfall you should be aware of while developing asynchronous front end code. Backend developers are safe: they can easily copy code from any of the articles above to their NodeJS application, and it will work just fine. Really! However, if you are going to run this code in a browser environment as is, it would be a serious mistake! None of the examples is correctly adjusted for the front end. This is a disaster: in the top 10 Google references on “async await”, I failed to find any examples correctly adjusted for the front end. Junior/middle JS developers and newcomers use these examples as the basis for their work and develop incorrect code that results in unexpected bugs and performance loss all over the place.

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