The most famous piece of Lisp-related vaporware is vapor no longer: Arc has been released. After paging through the tutorial, I’m a bit underwhelmed. It looks like just a bunch of syntactic sugar implemented on top of Scheme. Clojure is more interesting and more innovative. Clojure and Arc have some things in common: data structures are functions on their keys, strings are sequences, and lambda is “fn”. But Arc seems to be more in the traditional, semi-imperative model whereas Clojure borrows heavily from functional programming. Arc even has for-loops, for goodness sakes. Obviously, I have no idea what else Paul Graham may have up his sleeve, so maybe there’s much more exciting stuff to come. But for now Arc looks to me like a modest improvement on Common Lisp / Scheme rather than a major new language.

I finally found out how to do this, from the Rails Routing shortcut by David Black. In the Rails console, do this:

include ActionController::UrlWriter
default_url_options[:host] = 'whatever'

Then you can call your named route methods directly from the console.

I am happy to report that AltLaw.org‘s switch to Solr has worked very well. Solr is a RESTful search engine, built on Lucene. The setup was more complicated than just using a search library, but the rewards were worth it.

Before, I was using Ferret, which I still like. It’s a great library, and Dave Balmain has done incredible work producing a fast search engine that integrates well with Ruby. I still use it on other sites. But Solr was a better fit for AltLaw.

With Ferret, I was trying to shoe-horn large, unstructured documents into a system — ActiveRecord, MySQL, and acts_as_ferret — that is better suited to small, structured records. Now I use Solr as both a search engine and a document store, eliminating MySQL from the picture. That, combined with Solr’s built-in caching, has dramatically decreased the server load (from around 2.00 to under 0.30) while visibly improving search performance.

Also, I think it helps that Solr is not integrated with Ruby. The solr-ruby gem is not well documented, but easy to figure out, as it’s just a thin wrapper over the Solr APIs. Having the search engine in a separate process made it easier to separate the indexing & searching part of the code from the web application. As a result, the Rails code shrunk to one-fourth its former size.