atom thoughts

Before I dive into what that title means, a little background:

To provide full-text searching of gifts within the GiftHat.com, I am using a ruby gem called Ferret written by Dave Balmain.

Ferret is a port of the popular Java search engine called Lucene.

The Ferret library is excellent, but one thing it suffers from is poor Windows support due in large part to the lack of good support for Windows by ruby itself.

But it looks like that is about to change thanks to a new Apache project called Lucy. Lucy will be a direct port of the Java Lucene engine in pure C. This will provide a much more straight-forward way to integrate the Lucene searching functionality into non-Java languages such as ruby, perl, PHP and python.

This is excellent news thanks to Dave Balmain and Marvin Humphrey for making this happen.

For further reading on this news, read it straight from the source here