Which is a better gem for indextank?

Question

I am using indextank with heroku. Which is a better gem to use, indextank or thinkingtank? I looked at the documentation, and tutorials for both,and it seems like thinkingtank is easier to use. A related/follow up question: what are the advantages/disadvantages of each?

Answer 1

It depends on what you're doing. If you are writing a simple app that's not based on ActiveRecord, the indextank client lets you add and search content without storing anything within your app. An example: if you are fetching tweets, you could index them directly without having a data model on your side. It's more "low level", so to speak.

If you are using ActiveRecord or another ORM, you should take a look at Tanker, it's more actively developed than ThinkingTank:

https://github.com/kidpollo/tanker

Hope this answers your question, if not please come chat with us at http://indextank.com (chat widget on the main page) and we'll be happy to help!

Answer 2

As Diego said, Tanker does seem like it has much going for it. Alternatively you could use IndexTanked:

https://github.com/zencoder/index-tanked

We wrote this library to power search on zencoder.com. Documentation is non-existant so far, but is coming.

One important feature included in IndexTanked, that was a necessity for us, was fault-tolerance. IndexTanked includes configurable fallback methods for use in case of failure to index, delete from the index, or search. Additionally, it limits calls to indextank by checking if the indexed fields have changed on updates. You can even obtain which fields we're checking against so you can select the minimum viable fields to be indexed when needed.

You can drop the author, Adam, a line at [email protected] if you have an questions (perfectly reasonable with the lack of docs).