Max Kiesler - Web Design, SOMA San Franciso

AJAX and Ruby on Rails Based Spellchecker Demo

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Sunday, September 11, 2005

Today I found a great AJAX based spellchecker demo which uses ActionPack instead of ActiveRecord. As with many Rails applications this wonderful app only requires 67 lines of code plus a few HTML templates.

PrimaGrasp has put up an excellent demo of their AJAX and ruby on rails based spellchecker. Unfortunately they have not put up the source code at this point, but I have emailed them to ask : )

Spell checking is done via GNU Aspell, which is a Free and Open Source spell checker designed to eventually replace Ispell. It can either be used as a library or as an independent spell checker. Its main feature is that it does a superior job of suggesting possible replacements for a misspelled word than just about any other spell checker out there for the English language.

Spelling suggestions are offered via AJAX powered links which is the same system used in GMail, I found the spellchecker to be a very intuitive application, and can see many uses for it. Spellchecking comments will be my first experiment if PrimaGrasp releases the source code.

Hats off to the devlopers!

The demo has only been tested on Firefox so if you can’t view the demo upgrade to a better browser.

[Technorati tags: ajax, xml, rubyonrails, ruby on rails, xml, javascript]

Comments on this post

max  on  09/12  at  01:14 AM

Max,

Glad you like it. Demo was sketched together to show a customer that it is possible and we can do it.

Source code is not in a releasable state, for example no clear separation between functionality and advertisement. No simple install, you’ll have to compile ruby extension by hand. Although this last problem will soon solved, when raspell author Matthias Veit will make a release in ruby gem format.

However lack of source code should not be a problem, as you can reproduce it easily by following the short tutorial posted on http://deezsombor.blogspot.com. BTW we are very interested in your experiments, be it a comment checker or anything else.

Cheers,
Dee Zsombor

Harry Maugans  on  05/28  at  09:44 PM

I tested it in Firefox and Internet Explorer 7, and it works in both.