Dave - thanks for Ferret, and your sharing it with us here. I've not
had a chance to try it personally yet, but will very soon.
On 24 Oct 2005, at 01:55, David Balmain wrote:
Just to clarify a few things, the reason I chose the name Ferret
and not
RubyLucene is because 1) rubylucene was already taken ;-)
Well, it wasn't really taken exactly. I started rucene and renamed
it to rubylucene at rubyforge a long while ago and never did anything
with it beyond some very very rudimentary low-level I/O work. My
main hesitation, besides the zillion other time commitments, was my
concern about duplicating effort given how PyLucene works with GCJ
and SWIG and can come up to speed with Java Lucene almost automatically.
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 long as it is compatible with the index format I think it's fair
to use "lucene" in the name. You're welcome to "rubylucene" if you
like :)
As for what I've ported so far? Almost everything. All query types
including
span queries are in there.
Impressive!
Lucene 1.4.3 compatibility? Or TRUNK?
* 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.
Do you think there is anything about the Java implementation that
could be improved in this regard so that the difference is not so
dramatic? What is the C code optimizing that the Java is not?
Surely we could bring the Java implementation close to C level speed
in terms of I/O, no?
While indexing speed is certainly very important, in many (most?)
projects the searching speed is the main concern and indexing speed
is of much less concern.
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
You can count on it... I'll be there a little later today!
Erik
