I have been away, thank you for the efforts in forking the item browser and fixing some stuff.
Memcache is not necessarily a hard dependency, it can be changed to a file cache, in this file: https://github.com/Sheco/cdda-itembrowser/blob/master/src/app/config/cache.php
Although if this is done, there’s something that needs to be taken into consideration, the database indexer uses a file cache, which is the same storage as the search, but the database indexer runs on the command line and the search is run on the webserver, so there might be some file permission issues.
Today I performed some quick and dirty patches to fix the cdda-trunk’s database indexing, but I see the changes done in the repo you mentioned are a lot more thorough, so I think I should probably merge those.