Faceted Queries on acts_as_solr Associations (Thursday, May 20, 2010) - Recently in a rails app that employs Solr (via the acts_as_solr plugin) I've had the need to produce aggregate counts of entities on the far end of a many-to-many relationship. Essentially a tag cloud. My first attempt was to keep it entirely in ActiveRecord which resulted in a proliferation of SQL command executions. Obviously that wasn't performant. Sure it
MapReduce with MongoMapper (Sunday, August 01, 2010) - A number of rails projects I've been working on lately have used MongoDB for a back-end via MongoMapper. In general it seems to do pretty much anything I'd want to do in a typical web app but finding documentation on how to do it can be difficult. One such task I came across recently was performing on-the-fly map-reduce. After implementing it myself I decided to
Full-Text Indexing in Ruby Using Ferret (Saturday, November 28, 2009) - Few things are more useful that a good full-text search. It's clearly the easiest way for users to actively drill down into the content they want. It's also quite easy on the Ruby programmer to implement thanks to Ferret, an Apache Lucene-inspired search engine library. Building an Index The first step to implementing a search is to get an index built.
