spell checking

boingolover has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am trying to set up an interactive web - based spell - checker, preferably implemented server - side. I have checked out Lingua::Ispell, and it looks promising. But we have some problems. We use multiple machines running mod_perl and use a proxy to handle load - balancing. In other words, if I find a misspelled word, I send a page back to the user showing the offending word with some suggestions. however, when I submit back, I don't even know for sure which machine it will end up on. The only shared resources for these machines is the database. I'm considering storing state info there, but I have concerns about performance. Is there anything out there that will work well and save a bit of work on my end (such as a commercial package or whatnot)?

Comment on spell checking

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Re: spell checking by eg (Friar) on Feb 03, 2001 at 06:47 UTC
Yes, storing state info in your database will slow things down (whether or not the penalty incurred is acceptable is up to you.) Maybe I don't understand the problem, but I can't see what difference it makes which server the user uses. Say you send in your text to server A and it sends it back with some suggestions for the misspellings. Then you send the (possibly corrected) text to server B to be written to the database. So what? I don't see a problem with that. What I would do is have an html form with two submit buttons -- one to spell check and one to commit the text to the database. That way you can spell check to your heart's content and then commit (with possible misspellings) whenever you're ready.	[reply]
Re: spell checking by cianoz (Friar) on Feb 03, 2001 at 06:51 UTC
I vould suggest using Apache::Session::DBI (i don't use this package on large projects so i can say nothing about performace issues...)	[reply]