I didn’t start out to exactly write an application, but to write some sort of generator for rails applications. I wanted to give an Open Search interface to any rails application that was backed by a simple search engine.

And I actually did it. The end result is:

• an indexing script that runs through all the Models looking for those that are descended from ActiveRecord’s and indexing the contents of those fields.
• a simple_search controller to handle the request (with Routes)
• set of html based rendering templates
• set of Open Search RSS result rendering templates

I don’t have any application online to show how it is working, but I’ll try and get some sort of packaging and how-to written up and posted to the ruby on rails mailling list.