Databaseless app choices

Rails
#1

Hi
I want to write a simple Rails app that gets a list (of TFS Workitems)
using a
Web Service and presents it on a web page to users.

I would like to:

  • try and avoid using a DB (for simplicity)
  • have a free text search
  • filter and sort the list
  • user login
  • different users see different subsets of list data
  • maintain a complete copy of the list in my app. Update regularly by
    calling
    WS for latest changes.
  • keep things simple as I am a noob

so my questions are:

  1. how should I store my data (DB, XML file? etc). If DB - which?
  2. how should I do the regular update. Rake,CRON etc
  3. based on storage choice, how do I do free text search. I have read
    about
    ferret and sphynx. Do they require DBs?

thanks for any suggestions
Rhubarb

#2

Hi

I am also interested to know if there are any tools/techniques that can
help
with * list presentation functionality

  • presentation code minimisation

Rhubarb

#3

Rhubarb wrote:

Hi
I want to write a simple Rails app that gets a list (of TFS Workitems)
using a
Web Service and presents it on a web page to users.

I would like to:

  • try and avoid using a DB (for simplicity)

In many cases, using a DB makes things simpler.

  • have a free text search
  • filter and sort the list
  • user login
  • different users see different subsets of list data
  • maintain a complete copy of the list in my app. Update regularly by
    calling
    WS for latest changes.
  • keep things simple as I am a noob

so my questions are:

  1. how should I store my data (DB, XML file? etc). If DB - which?

Probably a DB will be easiest. I recommend PostgreSQL.

  1. how should I do the regular update. Rake,CRON etc

There are many possibilities; I’ll let folx who are more familiar with
them address that question.

  1. based on storage choice, how do I do free text search. I have read
    about
    ferret and sphynx. Do they require DBs?

I think so, but honestly, you’ll want a DB anyway for this project.

thanks for any suggestions
Rhubarb

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

#4

On Oct 2, 2:41 pm, Marnen Laibow-Koser <rails-mailing-l…@andreas-
s.net> wrote:

  1. based on storage choice, how do I do free text search. I have read
    about
    ferret and sphynx. Do they require DBs?

I think so, but honestly, you’ll want a DB anyway for this project.

sphinx doesn’t require a db- as long as documents have a unique
numeric identifier you can feed sphinx and can also give it your data
as suitably formatted xml. But yeah, I don’t see why avoiding a db is
a particularly good idea (although depending on the shape of your data
a non relational database may be more appropriate than a relational
one - from what has been said so far it doesn’t look like this is one
of those cases)

Fred