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The Coveo R&D delegation just came back from Dreamforce in San Francisco and we had a fantastic week. Coveo sends a pretty large contingent every year, which includes part of our teams working directly or indirectly on our Coveo for Salesforce product. One thing of great importance to me is that we finally got to announce our upcoming freemium offering, which will allow our customers and partners to use Coveo’s advanced UIs, Usage Analytics, and machine learning based ranking at a very low price (even for free, in some cases!). I’ve been working on this project on and off for almost a year now (starting from a late night prototype), and it has since grown into a full product. I can’t wait to see people using this in the field.

In July 2016, the Coveo Search UI, also known as the Coveo JavaScript Search Framework, became open-source. This means that, from now on, anyone will be able to go on GitHub, take the Coveo Search UI, and modify the code itself to adapt it to their own needs.

The excellent Sitecore PowerShell Extension allows you to return items from your index and display its properties in a friendly manner, all of this at a much faster speed than using the Content Search API. This is, of course, just one function of that rich extension.

When I try to code, I always ask myself what’s right and what’s wrong about software quality. Sometimes, those questions aren’t easy to answer, but as software developers, we must answer them. Over my short time (4 years) as a developer, I developed certain universal and basic interrogations. I found some by reading online and others by questioning myself. When answered correctly, they can give you a hint at the quality of a software.

We recently decided to move our functional tests stack from python to Java, mainly to make coding them easier (our project’s backend is coded in Java) and thus increase the number of tests getting written. We needed a few things to make this possible and one of them was a complete and comprehensive Java client for the Usage Analytics API. Since a lot of the Java API clients we use internaly are built with Netflix’s Feign, I decided to give it a go.

We have many interns right now at Coveo. For the summer, this process starts in February when we get over one hundred applications through multiple universities. All those applications had one thing in common, The Resume. Over the years, I’ve read hundreds of them and have therefore accumulated a good list of what you should and shouldn’t do.

When writing JavaScript, I spend a lot of time fixing simple mistakes. Unlike compiled languages you are more likely to make mistakes. It is easy for syntax errors to sneak into your code without realizing it until you actually try and run your code. How many times have I got an undefined variable because I refactored some code and forgot to rename that variable. Even though it has been more than 5 years since I wrote my first Hello World. The feeling remains the same – Why did I make this mistake again ?

Some parts of Coveo’s query pipeline are extensible using JavaScript. We initially used DynJS, but since it’s now unmaintained, we had to switch to a new JS engine, namely Nashorn that comes out-of-the-box starting with Java 8. Nashorn works pretty well, but it’s missing built-in support for the require function that is used with CommonJS modules.

Writing an API client in JavaScript is a lot of work, you have to write one for Node.js and one for the browser. I found out a way to have both on the same codebase with the same API, all that with only changes to the build scripts. It’s called isomorphic code, and doing it with modern TypeScript isn’t easy, but it’s achievable.

For website search, relevancy of the search results should be a priority. When indexing a Sitecore item with Coveo for Sitecore, you want as much information as possible to be indexed. That’s why you probably use the HtmlContentInBodyWithRequestsProcessor to index the Sitecore rendered HTML of the item. However, you don’t want to index global sections of the HTML like the header, footer, navigation, ads and sidebars. A few solutions were available to do so. This post details a simple solution that involves only a Sitecore processor and minor edits to layouts, sublayouts or views.