So I’m in the process of ripping out Ferret and moving to Ultrasphinx for Cabernet’s search engine.

Ultrasphinx is known for better scalability and reliability compared to Ferret, which is critical if Cabernet is going to go multi-user. It also should make it much easier to sort and paginate search results. However, things are a bit semi-broken right now as I need to completely rewrite both the views & controller to utilize the new sorting functionality of Ultrasphinx. I’m also planning on moving to a more RESTful design making the index and search the same view/controller method.

As a side note, I announced Cabernet on the Vino Cellar forums. I have to say I was a bit surprised with the complete lack of any useful feedback. Seems like everyone there is in love with CellarTracker and couldn’t be bothered to check out the demo before commenting and so ended up just asking stupid questions. *sigh*

The good news is that it sounds like Eric from CT is getting a lot of requests from people like me looking to interact with the CT site via a remote API. Currently Eric has implemented displaying some info via XML, but there’s no way to create or update records. Hopefully he’ll have something in a few months, but until then I’m going to keep hacking on Cabernet.