Hey folks, Since this is the Ferret mailing list I should preface this by that the donation of time and help by people like Jens Kraemer, Jan Prill and all the other people who have contributed to Ferret is just as valuable to me as any financial assistance. Thanks.
Ferret has been a labour of love but it has taken up a lot more of my life than I ever expected. At in excess of 50,000 lines of code, I believe it is one of the largest Ruby projects, especially with only a single developer. (previous version before rewrite had >70,000 LOC so added together that is a lot of work). I would love to keep pushing Ferret forward at the rate it has been going but other things are going to have to start taking priority (like putting food on the table). If you find Ferret useful in your application and you aren't able to contribute with the development, please consider making a donation at the Ferret website: http://ferret.davebalmain.com/trac So where do I see Ferret going in the future? I'd really like to build an object-database based on Ferret, with ActiveRecord and Og bindings. Why?: * Fixes the current DRY problems with Ferret. ie, should you store data in the Ferret index to take advantage or highlighting? Or build your own highlighter so that the data isn't stored in two places. * Simplifies things. You'll be able to forget about IndexReaders, IndexWriters, file-locking, etcetera. Just create the database as you usually would and you have Ferret full-text search built in. * Range queries just work. No need to pad numbers or format dates correctly. * Sort just works. And it won't take forever to build the sort-index (currently a problem on very large indexes). * Performance, performance, performance. As people are often pointing out, the bottle neck in many applications falls in the data access layer. Mapping relational database schemas to Ruby objects (or any OO language for that matter) can be very expensive at run-time. A good object database should easily outperform even SQLite. (and I'm being very cautious here) Right now, I'd need to raise at least 5 figures before I'd consider this undertaking so please send some encouragement my way if you would be interested in something like this. Otherwise I'd appreciate any kind of contribution, financial or assistance with development. In the meantime I will continue to improve test coverage and Ferret documentation, fix bugs and help people on the Ferret mailing list. Happy Ferreting. Dave _______________________________________________ Ferret-talk mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ferret-talk
