[Xapian-discuss] acts_as_xapian, pre-release (Ruby on Rails)

[Richard Boulton]

Francis Irving wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been using Ruby on Rails, and finally got fed up with Solr/Lucene. So I've
> made acts_as_xapian. An early version is available here:

Though I'm not a Ruby guy, this sounds really good, thanks! :)

> P.S. Is adding highlighting to QueryParser on the development plan? By that I
> mean a function which you give it some text and a number of words and a
> highlighting prefix/postfix, and it returns an extract of the text highlighted
> for the query. I really feel it is something that belongs in QueryParser, as
> it is fundamental to the format of queries to do it well (i.e. with quoting,
> and prefixes and operators, and even ranges), and nearly every search
> application needs it.

I was going to point you to the relevant ticket in trac, but there 
doesn't seem to be one!  It's certainly something which has been 
discussed, and would be very nice to have, but we've just not got around 
to it yet.  There is code to do highlighting in Omega, which could 
probably be pulled into xapian-core without too much effort.

There is a ticket in trac about producing dynamic summaries / snippets 
based on the search (so that the displayed summary text for each 
document is relevant to the search text): http://trac.xapian.org/ticket/211

For what it's worth, I don't think highlighting exactly belongs in the 
QueryParser, but would be a useful addition to the 
"QueryParser/TermGenerator" family of objects.


Regarding missing features, I can't think of any particular examples. 
Maybe access to Xapian's support for synonyms would be useful for some 
people.

The 1.1.0 release of xapian (still a few months away, I fear) will 
include support for efficient database replication - ie, building the 
index on one machine, and replicating it across multiple search machines 
by sending just the parts which have changed with each commit(), which 
is definitely useful for high volume sites (it was developed to help 
with http://mydeco.com/).  But I can't think of any similarly cool 
features you've missed which exist on HEAD.

> # * Xapian's awesome email list - the kids over at xapian-discuss are super
> # helpful. Useful if you need to extend and improve acts_as_xapian. The
> # Ruby bindings are mature and well maintained as part of Xapian.
> # http://lists.xapian.org/mailman/listinfo/xapian-discuss

Thanks!

-- 
Richard