Telergy
From SarahWiki
Telergy is a real-time text retrieval, messaging and queueing system that was initially implemented as a back-end for an email system, then extended to form the back-end for a financial news distribution system, and then again to include natural language querying features for use as a search engine and a conversational natural language system.
Coding initially started in the mid to late 1990s, initially involving myself and Sarah Addams. Other tools interacting with Telergy have been worked on by many people, though the system was never released as a product in its own right. It sat mostly idle from 2001 until 2007, when I decided to resurrect it.
Contents |
Downloads
- SourceForge project page (Under construction)
(Note that at the time of writing, the SourceForge pages are under construction)
Licensing
Telergy will shortly be made available under a BSD-style license. For the avoidance of doubt, this means that it's basically free for use for (nearly) any purpose, with no requirement to share the source code of derivative works or of software that uses it as a back-end. Of course, anyone making changes is very welcome (and encouraged!) to contribute to the main codebase.
The license is as follows:
* Copyright (c) 1995-2007, Sarah Thompson and Sarah Addams * All rights reserved. * * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: * * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. * * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the * documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. * * Neither the name Telergy nor the * names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products * derived from this software without specific prior written permission. * * THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY SARAH THOMPSON AND SARAH ADDAMS ``AS IS'' AND ANY * EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED * WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE * DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL SARAH THOMPSON OR SARAH ADDAMS BE LIABLE FOR ANY * DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES * (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; * LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND * ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT * (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS * SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
Telergy has been provided to specific OEM customers under other licenses in the past -- since the BSD license is strictly more permissive than all of those licenses, this license should be regarded as superseding and subsuming all previous licenses.
Documentation
There was some, once, but the Word documents containing it are long lost unfortunately. For obvious reasons, this is a pretty important to-do item, so expect this are of my Wiki to start including information about the API, message formats and query language.
Current State, Future Plans
The current Telergy codebase is based on Win32, but I intend to port it to 64-bit Linux as part of the dusting-off process.
Why?
I'm working on a grid computing project that needs a back-end messaging system -- Telergy fits the bill pretty well, so it makes more sense to dust it off and get it ported than to mess about with other less ideal solutions. I had considered using something like MPI, PVM or OpenMOSIX, but the latter isn't installed on the cluster I have access to, and one of my collaborators has had bad experiences with the others in the past, so it makes sense to go with something that we can control completely. Also, Telergy is a far richer environment than either MPI or PVM (possibly at the cost of some performance), which suits our needs better, particularly since our processing jobs are compute-heavy with relatively little I/O.
Why Telergy?
Telergy is a 19th century English word meaning, 'the force underlying magic.' Which is kind-of cool. I (along with Sarah Addams) have had the telergy.com domain name for about 10 years now, which pre-dates the name's usage by the now-defunct ISP telergy.net. Nor do we have anything to do with the set-top-box people, telergy.eu. We're not them, they aren't us. Don't get us mixed up. :-)
Where can I get it?
Right now, you can't, because I want to dust off the code and make sure that any remnant bits of non-BSD compliant code are removed. There shouldn't be anything like that in the core code, but there may be issues with some of the tools, which needs checking out.
For the moment, telergy.com points to these pages within my personal Wiki -- eventually, this will probably migrate to its own Wiki. At the time of writing, a Sourceforge registration for the project is pending, so hopefully the project will be hosted there very soon.
