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

[Francis Irving]

I'm now using this on the live version of our Freedom of Information
website.

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com

If you fancy using acts_as_xapian, it's quite a bit more mature now.

Is anybody a Rails / Gem guru, or know one who fancies working out how
to package it up properly for the Rails world to enjoy?

Francis

On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 11:51:00AM +0100, 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:
> 
> https://secure.mysociety.org/cvstrac/dir?d=mysociety/foi/vendor/plugins/acts_as_xapian
> 
> It works, but isn't deployed on a live site yet (will be on our UK Freedom of
> Information request filing/archiving site www.whatdotheyknow.com soon)
> 
> I've put the parts of the documentation which compare it to acts_as_solr at
> the bottom of this email.
> 
> Any suggestions as to features it should have that would be easy to add? It's
> got sort, date range, collapse, spelling, offline indexing, and integration
> with Rail models. Anything else big/obvious that most people will need?
> Or anything easy to add and genius looking (like spelling was!)?
> 
> If anyone can try it out, patches welcome!, then that would be super awesome.
> It's really not been used much yet as I only made it the day before yesterday,
> so buyer beware.
> 
> Francis
> mySociety
> 
> 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.
> 
> # Comparison to acts_as_solr (as on 24 April 2008)
> # ==========================
> #
> # * Offline indexing only mode - which is a minus if you want changes
> # immediately reflected in the search index, and a plus if you were going to
> # have to implement your own offline indexing anyway.
> #
> # * Collapsing - the equivalent of SQL's "group by". You can specify a field
> # to collapse on, and only the most relevant result from each value of that
> # field is returned. Along with a count of how many there are in total.
> # acts_as_solr doesn't have this.
> #
> # * No highlighting - Xapian can't return you text highlighted with a search query.
> # You can try and make do with TextHelper::highlight. I found the highlighting
> # in acts_as_solr didn't really understand the query anyway.
> #
> # * Date range searching - maybe this works in acts_as_solr, but I never found
> # out how.
> #
> # * Spelling correction - "did you mean?" built in and just works.
> #
> # * Multiple models - acts_as_xapian searches multiple models if you like,
> # returning them mixed up together by relevancy. This is like multi_solr_search,
> # only it is the default mode of operation and is properly supported.
> #
> # * No daemons - However, if you have more than one web server, you'll need to
> # work out how to use Xapian's remote backend http://xapian.org/docs/remote.html. 
> #
> # * One layer - full-powered Xapian is called directly from the Ruby, without
> # Solr getting in the way whenever you want to use a new feature from Lucene.
> #
> # * No Java - an advantage if you're more used to working in the rest of the
> # open source world. acts_as_xapian, it's pure Ruby and C++.
> #
> # * 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
> #
> 
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