Currently, all the forum and news article downloading and scraping happens on a different machine to the web server. It has a VPN connection to the database and memcache servers, but I’d like to integrate the Ferret text indexing system for better searching capabilities. To centralise Ferret, I have a three options:

1. regularly reindex new content from the database on the web server;
2. DRb a Ferret Object;
3. or use ActiveResource to access the models via the web service.

DRb-ing a Ferret Object would be quite elegant, but using ActiveResource would also replace the need for a database and memcache connection (and I could do much better fragment caching actually).

Anyway, I searched high and low for some docs – lots of blog entries about how great it is, but no real api docs. When I searched through the Rails code and found nothing either, I got suspicious. Finally I found a couple of blog entries stating that ActiveResource was dropped from Rails 1.2. It seems to be planned for Rails 2.0. Not sure how I missed this. I guess my search-foo is lacking.

I’ll be investigating other options. I’d much prefer not to build a SOAP or XMLRPC interface. Ugh.