Based on a tip from Russell Williams, I’ve played a little bit with acts_as_ferret and like what I see so far.   

Ferret is a port of the Lucene full-text engine for Ruby, and acts_as_ferret is a plugin for Rails that makes it easy to make any ActiveRecord model full-text searchable. 

Roman Mackovcak provides a set of ferret recipes, including how to do pagination, which is not supported out of the box. 

Ferret supports the same rich query syntax that Lucene does and can read files created using standard Lucene without conversions. Some of the supported query syntax options include wildcard searches (te?t matches test), fuzzy matching based on Levenshtein distance (dictonary~ matches dictionary), proximity searches, range searches, keyword weight, and boolean operators.

Update: Dion notes that Ferret no longer uses the Lucene file format, unfortunately.. The file format was changed in order to improve performance.

To accompany the rumored renewal of affections between Brad and Jen, eWeek is reporting a thaw in the chill between Hibernate and Spring:

Despite an often tense relationship between leaders in their respective open-source communities, the Spring and JBoss leaders are now talking about a truce.

Rod Johnson, chief executive of Interface21, the company that maintains the Spring Framework, told eWEEK that he would welcome an opportunity to work with JBoss. Johnson spoke with eWEEK just weeks after JBoss leader Marc Fleury told eWEEK he was open to working with the Spring community in some fashion.

The apparent thaw in the often chilly relationship could signal a big boon to Java developers who use the Spring Framework with JBoss’ Hibernate technology. Spring is a lightweight Java application framework that helps developers avoid the complexity of the Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE), while Hibernate is an object/relational persistence and query service for Java.

Reporting the conflict from the frontlines was Jobster’s senior war correspondant Scott Haug: 

The height of the friction between the two camps was perhaps best captured in a blog post from last year by Scott Haug, a developer at Jobster, entitled “Hibernate Hates Spring.”

However, many developers who posted comments to Haug’s post said they use both Spring and Hibernate, and many called for a truce.