Lucene Finds its Way to the Top

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has recently reclassified the Lucene search engine project from a Jakarta sub-project to a top-level ASF effort.

Lucene is a full text search engine that provides an API and a set of libraries enabling powerful search functionality to be included in all types of Java applications. Doug Cutting is the project's primary developer.

Lucene is offered as a developer toolkit, and requires a certain amount of Java development to implement or integrate a functional search solution.

As an example, for web search, a developer would need to write their own web site spider that populated the Lucene index with Lucene documents.

On the retrieval side, the developer would then need to provide a form handler and query parser that called into the Lucene API for search hits and formatted the results for web presentation.

Given this, its best to think of Lucene as a developer resource and not as a ready to run search engine.

There are several ports of Lucene to other languages. Of note are DotLucene (C# .NET) and Plucene (PERL).

Plucene is currently used by Technorati, is embedded in the Eclipse IDE, and is part of www.furl.com's tools.

Lucene Finds its Way to the Top

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has recently reclassified the Lucene search engine project from a Jakarta sub-project to a top-level ASF effort.\n\nLucene is a full text search engine that provides an API and a set of libraries enabling powerful search functionality to be included in all types of Java applications. Doug Cutting is the project's primary developer.

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