Hy,
I’m implementing an IMAP client as a Mac OSX application using MacRuby.
For the sake of offline availability, I wanted to allow fulltext indexing and attribute based indexing of all messages. Attributes include common E-Mail stuff like from:, to:, etc…
This would allow for advanced results sprinkled with faceting, analytic calculations and such.
Now I’m unsure about the choices and good practices when it comes to integrating such a search feature. I have a strong web development background, therefore my intuitive action would be to setup a Solr server and start feeding it with data. This might just work theoretically, as I could write an Agent that manages the solr instance for my application in the background. But to me, this approach seems like an infrastructure hassle.
On the other side, I’ve read about people using the FTS3 functionality from SQLite. This approach is easily accessible by CoreData. I haven’t used SQLite’s FTS3 but I don’t think it is as powerful as Solr can be.
What is your weapon of choice for a use case like mine?
I’m mainly interested in solutions that are actually in use by Objective-C/Cocoa/MacRuby developers.
In you’re going to develop the app with Ruby give a try to picky. It is very simple to use.