Tom Fürstner told me about an interview with the author of Ferret, the Ruby port of Lucene:
I'm really keen to implement an object database in C with
built-in full-text search based on Ferret. A lot of the problems
people are currently having with Ferret are due to the problems with
keeping the index in synch with the database. The current solution
isn't very DRY since you are storing data in two different places, the
database and the Ferret index. Combining the two would make life a lot
easier for developers using Ferret, not to mention the performance
improvements that you could get with a good object database bound to
Ruby
Amen, brother. Note that Ferret is an inverse database (IOW, you give the value, maybe even fuzzy, and it gives you the keys under which this value is stored) and its currency are multi-field, schema-less documents. It seems that today such a database could find acceptance from a large segment of the web programmer population.
Before services like Google and Technorati it was not widely understood that it is feasible to let third parties provide web-wide hyperlink databases.
The next step must be a WWW visualization service, an Adobe Creative Studio for the Data Web. There's still a lot of guesswork, but there's reason to believe that Microformats and RDF as content, feeds and entries as envelopes, Atom Publishing Protocol as access medium, and SVG as the first open graphics system could be main pillars of such a service.
And on top, a Data Web IDE. Volunteers?
A tip: study UserLand Frontier. If you don't know it, you'll likely re-invent and re-implement large parts of it, just like Common Lisp.
Even if you do know either, you'll likely re-invent and re-implement large parts of 'em.
Posted by: chl | October 28, 2006 at 22:01
It's a different thing when you know it though.
Posted by: Manuel | October 29, 2006 at 01:37