I did a short talk on Ferret, the Ruby “Information Retreival Library”, at the North West Ruby Users Group last Thursday. We had a bit of a theme too, with Will Jessop speaking about Sphinx and Asa Calow speaking about Solr.
I got to have a bit of a nosey around the Manchester BBC building too – though I was worried I’d open the wrong door and end up on TV. Didn’t fancy having to apologise to Jeremy Paxman.
Brightbox also sponsored some pizza, and gave away t-shirts and stickers like candy (there was no candy though).
My slides are available here, and contain a little example file system indexer. I made my slides with webby and S6 if you’re interested.
I am considering using ferret, the shared host I use has it installed. The questions in your slides:
Maintained?
Ruby 1.9?
apply to my situation. Did you find answers to them? thanks.
I think it’s fair to say that Ferret is unmaintained. There has been no major work on it in over a year and no other work in 7 months
As for Ruby 1.9 support, somebody has forked it and updated it for Ruby 1.9. You can see the feedback here:
http://isitruby19.com/ferret
and the announcement here:
http://pennysmalls.com/2009/03/24/ferret-on-ruby-191/