Hi everyone!
This is a very interesting thread, because it raises the question as
to whether Ferret is something you would want to use in a production
environment - or not.
I've been using Ferret in two applications and my experiences were
quite disappointing. I chose Ferret because it's fast and it's got a
Ruby API. Everything else about it is just annoying and potentially
hazardous.
What worries me most is the fact that Ferret is effectively an
abandoned project. The original author, who is the sole owner of the
code, hasn't been posting to this list for about six months. He hasn't
introduced any improvements in about the same period of time and many
bugs still remain unfixed. New bugs can't be submitted (let alone
patches) because the project Trac is offline.
There is no other component in my applications which behaves as badly
as Ferret. If you don't treat it _very_ carefully it will throw
segfaults as if this was an established way of indicating an error
condition.
The ActsAsFerret plugin _does_ treat ferret quite carefully and it's
the only reason why many people are able to use Ferret at all.
However, AAF is one approach and for some applications it might not be
the right one. Especially if you want to put multiple models in one
index - it's possible, but not really a flexible solution.
The most sensitive point of Ferret is concurrency and many people
actually use Ferret in distributed environments (which is usually a
Rails app that scales across several machines). AAF introduces a DRb
server to work around this problem, but with many concurrent read/
write requests, performance quickly degrades.
With the advent of JRuby, a myriad of Java-based solutions is now
accessible to Ruby developers, including many full-text indices. There
are very mature solutions readily available for production use and
many next-generation search engines currently in development.
For the next application that needs full text search, I'm most
definitely not going to use Ferret. I agree with Erik and give Solr a
shot.
I would like to encourage everyone, who is already using another full
text index for Ruby/Rails to share his/her experiences on this list.
Because I have the feeling that many people would like to get rid of
Ferret for exactly the same reasons I've pointed out above.
Andy
On 16.11.2007, at 22:13, Erik Hatcher wrote:
>
> On Nov 16, 2007, at 3:35 PM, Scott Davies wrote:
>> Am I a fool for wondering whether it might ultimately be less painful
>> to try an index server that runs Lucene under a JRuby process?
>
> Or, rather, an index server that runs Solr accessed with a pure Ruby,
> solr-ruby, API (which works with MRI or JRuby)? :)
>
> Erik
>
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