FAQ

Why bother? Why not just use Solr?

Good question. Solr has made full text indexing and faceted search interfaces simple to use and develop. A growing ecosystem has appeared around Solr to integrate into any number of applications, including Drupal and Wordpress and there are plenty of applications that function really as a UI to Solr.

The problem is that a lot of people use fairly cheap shared web hosting (or VPSes) to serve their content and the cost of upgrading to something that allows them to run a Java application server is prohibitive, especially if their scale is small (adding search to their blog or CMS, for example) or their needs modest. Since CheapSkate is Ruby/Rack based app, it’s fairly easy to deploy on most major web hosting packages.

So it’s a replacement for Solr?

No, not really. If you are looking for Solr, use Solr. If you are looking for something that uses a Lucene-like query syntax, is HTTP-based, provides faceting and plugs into your Solr-backed application, but can’t, for whatever reason, use Solr, CheapSkate might be a reasonable alternative.

Is CheapSkate’s API 100% compatible with Solr’s?

No. CheapSkate is being developed for needs that specifically arise (feature X is needed for application Y), so it will most likely only be a subset of functionality that Solr provides. Also, given that CheapSkate is really being reverse-engineered from copying the behavior of a working Solr instance, some naive assumptions may prevail.

Why Ruby? Why not Insert Language of Choice Here?

Ideally, CheapSkate would have been written in PHP using Zend_Search_Lucene to lower the barrier of entry even more. I am a Ruby developer, however. This started as a proof of concept (since I wasn’t sure if it was even feasible) and I can only invest so much time in this. If anybody is interested in porting CheapSkate to PHP, please do and let me know!

Also the prevalence of mod_rails/Passenger makes this less of an issue.

Where are the unit tests?

Yeah… Given that this (as stated above) started out as an experiment, there were no specs initially and when it came time to add them was unclear as to how they would really work. Any guidance would be appreciated.

How does it perform?

Pretty well, as long as your faceted result sets stay under around 15,000 hits. Any advice welcome for improving faceting performance over larger results sets.

Can I run CheapSkate on Heroku?

Unfortunately, no, since they don’t allow writing to the filesystem (see: http://docs.heroku.com/constraints#read-only-filesystem).

CheapSkate isn’t working for Insert Application Name Here

Submit a ticket explaining the application and what isn’t working and we’ll try to fix it (within reason).

Will search results be the same between Solr and CheapSkate?

Any similarities are entirely coincidental.

Which Response Writers does CheapSkate support?

• JSON
• Ruby

Not XML?

It hasn’t come up.

Which Request Handlers are supported?

• SearchHandler/StandardRequestHandler
• Dismax (although see the question associated with this)
• MoreLikeThis

Why is Dismax just using the standard SearchHandler?

If the standard search results are not meeting your needs, and you’re able to explain the difference between dismax and standard search, we could possibly implement something.

Which Solr search components are supported?

Right now only facets. Highlighting would be fairly trivial (since it’s built into Ferret). SpellCheckComponent would be nice, but I’m not sure how it would work, offhand.