# H4DEV.com searchable database for ruby and rails developers

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/h4dev-com-searchable-database-for-ruby-and-rails-developers/172666>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [July 24, 2009, 11:41pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/h4dev-com-searchable-database-for-ruby-and-rails-developers/172666 "2009-07-24T23:41:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Gene\_T](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/b782af/32.png) [@Gene\_T](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Gene_T)\
**Post date:** [July 24, 2009, 11:41pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/h4dev-com-searchable-database-for-ruby-and-rails-developers/172666/1 "2009-07-24T23:41:31Z")

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[http://h4dev.com/pages](http://h4dev.com/pages)

[H4dev.com](http://H4dev.com) is a searchable database for ruby, rails and javascript  
developers, concentrating on the following areas:

- ActiveRecord, SQL, MySQL: database design, maintenance and  
performance tuning

- Ruby and javascript language specifications, standard library, and  
each languages’s multiple implementations/releases

- Ajax libraries: jquery, YUI, Prototype framework, scriptaculous,  
mooTools, extJS

- Browser engines, and their bugs, for HTML, CSS, javascript: Firefox  
3, 3.5 ; Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8

- full-text indexing/queries: SOLR/lucene, Sphinx

- Developer’s tools: text editor (vim, emacs, NetBeans, textmate,  
eclipse), source control (git, SVN),  
• Ruby and javascript testing frameworks; unit testing, BDD /  
specifications, integration testing

The aim of this project is to have a database of ruby language syntax,  
tools, development techniques and bugs that make the search process  
less arduous for beginning and intermediate programmers. A database  
like this entails cataloging 10’s of thousands of URL’s into a topic  
map, collecting in each database record discussions of a narrow issue  
by different authors. I’ve tried to address all the tricky things  
about searching software topics: acronyms, compound words  
(“ActiveRecord”, actsAsSolr), etc.

So I’d like people to try it, give me feedback on the UI and how easy  
it is to locate stuff. The other aim of this project is to present a  
couple dozen or more URL’s in the search result on one page, so the  
query terms can be refined. The Title Tags on the “Search Hits” page  
(where it says “mouseover” under “Sphinx Hits”) convey a lot of  
information about what’s in the database record). Questions welcome,  
too, of course.

One thing about stopwords: It’s best if you manually edit out short  
words like “if”, “and”, “but” if they’re not essential to the query. I  
haven’t resolved which words should get knocked out of query strings,  
since many of them are important in ruby (“and”, “if”, “through”,  
“or”, “not”) and linux “etc”, “cat”. I’d like to execute the query  
both ways (knocking out stopwords and leaving them in the query  
string), in SOLR or sphinx search rather than in the Rails  
controller. If anybody has any input please let me know.