All

I've been using Ferret for the past few days and have been wondering
how best to integrate it with Rails. Initially I just setup the
following in my environment.rb file:

require 'ferret'
import Ferret

@@index = Index::Index.new()

However, this felt very unclean to me, so I decided the best way to do
it would be to create a separate model like this:

require 'singleton'
require 'ferret'

class CompanyIndex
  include Singleton
  include Ferret

  SEARCH_INDEX = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/db/index.db"

  def initialize
    @index = Index::Index.new(:path => SEARCH_INDEX)
  end

  def search
  # search code
  end

  def add
  # code to add to index
  end
end

etc. I then access it using CompanyIndex.instance.

Now, is this the best way to do this? Are there cleaner ways of integrating it?

Also, since Ferret requires a lock on the index, am I correct in
assuming that having multiple Rails dispatch threads running would not
work?

Luke