MojoFacets: server side faceted browsing

I am huge fan of Exhibit faceted browsing of data. However, Exhibit is implemented in JavaScript within your browser and that makes it unusable for larger amounts of data (more than 300 or so). In my case, 3800 elements is unusably slow even in latest Chrome or Firefox.

Something had to be done. If JavaScript inside browser isn't up to the task, you might wonder what would happen if you moved processing back to server side, and use browser just for task which they are good at: displaying generated HTML pages.

So, let me introduce MojoFacets - server-side facet browser based on Mojolicious with a bit of jQuery UI.

Although it seems strange to promote server-side solutions in 2010, this approach still makes sense. For just 40Mb of memory usage server side (including Mojo and dataset) you can get fast and usable facet browsing.