Howdy all,
I wanted to share this blog post we just published at Harvest:
If any of you are doing work involving clusters of Sphinx servers or with Sphinx under Rails 3, we think this gem is a pretty great fit. The approach is to use ERB templating to configure Sphinx instead of a DSL. You need to learn the Sphinx configuration syntax, but you get a really flexible solution in exchange.
We also support SphinxQL in this gem:
http://sphinxsearch.com/docs/manual-0.9.9.html#sphinxql
It's very minimal support, just a wrapper around Mysql2. I looked at creating an ARel wrapper, but SphinxQL itself ended up being a bit buggy about quotes and escaping values so we moved away from SphinxQL for now.
The gem is published at rubygems and you can find the code at Github:
https://github.com/harvesthq/thebes
Give it a look and let me know what you think. Thanks,
-Matthew