Hi All,
Brian McCallister suggested I announce Ferret here but it appears, from the
archives, that Erik Hatcher beat me to it. Anyway, in case you missed it,
the url is;
http://ferret.davebalmain.com/trac/
Just to clarify a few things, the reason I chose the name Ferret and not
RubyLucene is because 1) rubylucene was already taken ;-) and 2) I didn't
want to feel tied to the Apache Lucene API. If there is a better way to do
something in Ruby, I'd like to do it that way. Having said that, I've mostly
stuck to the Apache Lucene API. And I intend to continue supporting the
Apache Lucene index format. Hopefully some of the ideas in Ferret will one
day be adopted back into the Apache Lucene project.
As for what I've ported so far? Almost everything. All query types including
span queries are in there.
Where Ferret falls short at the moment is;
* Robustness: It's still alpha and some areas are better tested than others.
In particular, I really need to test threading.
* Unicode Support: At the index level, this isn't a problem, but as far as
analysis and search go, it needs a little work.
* Performance: Well, it is Ruby. However, I've written the indexer in C and
it makes the Java version seem painfully slow. So don't expect Ferret to
remain slower than Apache Lucene forever.
So, if anyone wants to help out, please download it, play with it and give
me your feedback. It's available as a gem and there is a quick tutorial
here;
http://ferret.davebalmain.com/api/files/TUTORIAL.html
Happy Ferreting.
Dave
Brian McCallister suggested I announce Ferret here but it appears, from the
archives, that Erik Hatcher beat me to it. Anyway, in case you missed it,
the url is;
http://ferret.davebalmain.com/trac/
Just to clarify a few things, the reason I chose the name Ferret and not
RubyLucene is because 1) rubylucene was already taken ;-) and 2) I didn't
want to feel tied to the Apache Lucene API. If there is a better way to do
something in Ruby, I'd like to do it that way. Having said that, I've mostly
stuck to the Apache Lucene API. And I intend to continue supporting the
Apache Lucene index format. Hopefully some of the ideas in Ferret will one
day be adopted back into the Apache Lucene project.
As for what I've ported so far? Almost everything. All query types including
span queries are in there.
Where Ferret falls short at the moment is;
* Robustness: It's still alpha and some areas are better tested than others.
In particular, I really need to test threading.
* Unicode Support: At the index level, this isn't a problem, but as far as
analysis and search go, it needs a little work.
* Performance: Well, it is Ruby. However, I've written the indexer in C and
it makes the Java version seem painfully slow. So don't expect Ferret to
remain slower than Apache Lucene forever.
So, if anyone wants to help out, please download it, play with it and give
me your feedback. It's available as a gem and there is a quick tutorial
here;
http://ferret.davebalmain.com/api/files/TUTORIAL.html
Happy Ferreting.
Dave