I have to say that the combination of Ruby, Eclipse, and Ferret have
just blown me away today. I've gone from knowing that Ruby existed (for
several years in fact), to thinking that I should check it out over the
last couple of months, to reading some of the doc yesterday, to having
a complete running installation of Ruby (through the One Click Windows
installer), with Eclipse layered on top, and Ferret installed and
operational - at least for this test example - in the space of 4 hours!

Really looking forward to the UTF-8 support too - some Google searching
on Ruby and UTF-8 led me to Ferret in the first place. Looks like an
absolutely great platform to do experiments in information retrieval
with - which is just what I need.

Well done and many thanks!

Peter