Yesterday we had Mat Brown of Patch.com giving us a presentation on his Sunspot gem for easily adding full-text search to a Rails application via Solr.
Mat walked us through the steps for adding Sunspot to a Rails application, talked through some of the production deployment concerns of Solr and illustrated some of the new features of Solr 1.4 such as master/slave replication and sharding that make it worth a look for full-text search.
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