Ryan Ripley . Com

Looks like I’m not the only one migrating over to Ruby…

From the site:

Ferret is a soon-to-be-high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in pure Ruby (with an optional C extension). It is a full port of the Apache Lucene Java project.

It looks like they still have a bit of work to do, but the fact this API even exists is pretty sweet. As I dig more and more into the Ruby/Rails community I find out that a lot of the Java API’s are being ported, and in a lot the cases are much simpler in the Ruby world, and have promises of running faster…

Currently Ferret is an order of magnitude slower than Apache Lucene which can be quite a pain at times. I have written some basic C extensions which you may or may not install when you install Ferret. These double the speed but still leave it a lot slower than the Java version. I have, however, ported the indexing part of Apache Lucene to C and it is an order of magnitude faster then the Java version. Once I’m pretty certain that the API of Ferret has settled and won’t be changing much, I’ll intergrate my C version. So expect to see Ferret running faster than Apache Lucene some time in the future. If you’d like to try cferret and test my claims, let me know (if you haven’t already found it in my subversion repository). It’s not currently portable and will probably only run on linux.

It can only help Rails gain more traction as more Java API’s start making their way over into the Ruby world… Plus they have a pretty sweet logo: