Interested in providing full-text search along with fast, lightweight data management for your Android applications? The new Perst 4.0 open source, object-oriented embedded database system brings native full-text search capability to Android, and builds on this feature to provide a sample search engine application for contact data residing on mobile phones.

To provide search, the database stores an inverse index of keywords, with parsing and stemming of indexed text performed either by user-defined code or by Perst’s default simple parser and stemmer. The feature supports logical operators and calculates relevance of search results to a query.

The new sample application for Android, ContactsIndex, stores and indexes contact information, and could be extended to provide search capabilities for PDF, word processing, HTML and other stored files. The example application is included with complete source code in the Perst 4.0 for Java distribution.

Also new in Perst 4.0 for Android: support for non-native objects, which expands the scope of the embedded database to benefit a larger variety of application types.

The Perst embedded database system helps developers create small-footprint embedded Java applications for Android that are fast, reliable, and cost-effective to develop and maintain.

The complete announcement of what’s new in Perst 4.0 is available at

http://www.mcobject.com/perst_v4_for_mobile_phones

Below some screenshots of the ContactsIndex demo application, running on the latest Android emulator.