From: David Balmain <dbalmain.ml@...>
Date: 2006-09-21T23:48:01+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] Ferret 0.10.6 released (and some benchmarks)

On 9/21/06, A. S. Bradbury <asbradbury@tekcentral.org> wrote:
> On Thursday 21 September 2006 03:48, David Balmain wrote:
> > ** Now Accepting Donations **
> >
> > Ferret has been a labour of love but it has taken up a lot more of my
> > life than I ever expected. At in excess of 50,000 lines of code, I
> > believe it is one of the largest Ruby projects, especially with only a
> > single developer. (previous version before rewrite had >70,000 LOC so
> > added together that is a lot of work). I would love to keep pushing
> > Ferret forward at the rate it has been going but other things are
> > going to have to start taking priority (like putting food on the
> > table). If you find Ferret useful in your application and you aren't
> > able to contribute with the development, please consider making a
> > donation at the Ferret website:
> >
> >     http://ferret.davebalmain.com/trac
> >
> > So where do I see Ferret going in the future? I'd really like to build
> > an object-database based on Ferret, with ActiveRecord and Og bindings.
> <snip awesome ideas for future direction>
>
> Wow, I'm completely astounded by the work you've done with ferret. You're a
> one man coding machine. Especially considering the number of projects or
> attempts to port lucene to C or other languages that have floundered. Might I
> suggest you post this announcement/call for donations to the rails mailing
> list? I think people might be *very* interested in your idea for an object
> database built on Ferret with AR bindings. That would be an incredibly
> exciting development, and hopefully some of the big Rails users will realise
> that.
>
> Regards,
>
> Alex

Thanks Alex. I did, in fact, announce this on the rails list as you
suggested. I agree that it would be very useful for a lot of Rails
developers, especially the way many are currently using relational
databases with AR (ie no foreign key constraints, all access to the
database through the model, one database per application). This
definitely something I'm very keen to do and I will get around to it
eventually, with or without support. It's more a matter of whether
I'll be able to do it in the next 6 months or the next 5 years. :-)

Thanks again for your support.

Dave