Is Lucene right for my app?

[Kevin Stembridge <ke...@gmail.com>]

Hi folks,
I'd like to add seach functionality to a homegrown webapp I'm building 
that will store and display news articles. I've been looking through the 
Lucene Wiki, FAQ and tutorials and it looks like it will be able to 
provide the functionality I'll need. But before I commit to a given 
technology I was hoping to get a bit of advice from the people who use 
Lucene to see if it is the right search technology for my app and also 
some hints on how I should design my app to best make use of Lucene.

First of all, a few details about the application might help. It is 
basically an archive of news articles. Users will be able to perform 
searches to query the articles, which are stored locally, using criteria 
such as full text search, query of headline, author, date range etc. I'm 
able to decide how the articles will be stored and I was planning on 
just creating them and storing them as static HTML pages. For every 
article there will be a database record containing fields such as title, 
author, date published.

So with that in mind, I have a few questions:

Would Lucene be a good choice for my app?
What is the best format to store documents in given that Lucene needs to 
search them but they still need to be rendered to a browser quickly?
How much development effort is usually involved in integrating Lucene 
with an application?

I hope this mailing list is the right place to be asking the questions. 
If not, just point me in the right direction. Either way I would be very 
grateful for any advice.

Cheers,
Kevin
 

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Re: Is Lucene right for my app?

[Doug Cutting <cu...@apache.org>]

Jeff Rodenburg wrote:
> My suggestion to you: pick up a copy of Lucene in Action. [ ...]
> The authors lurk on this list.

They're pretty chatty for lurkers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurker

But good advice nonetheless!

Cheers,

Doug

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Re: Is Lucene right for my app?

[Jeff Rodenburg <je...@gmail.com>]

Kevin -

You've come to the right list to get information to help you make a 
decision. That said, the responsible answer to your question will be "it 
depends". The supporter in me says Lucene is your best choice, hands down.

Your questions aren't as straightforward as you might expect. Lucene is an 
API, not a full-fledged search engine. It's up to you to put it to work 
within the confines of your operation, so determining what's *best* can 
normally only be determined by yourself.

My suggestion to you: pick up a copy of Lucene in Action. You'll get plenty 
of support on this mailing list, but you can educate yourself much more 
effectively with that book. The authors lurk on this list. It's the cheapest 
consulting ($40) you can get.

Cheers,
jeff



On 9/18/05, Kevin Stembridge <ke...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Would Lucene be a good choice for my app?
> What is the best format to store documents in given that Lucene needs to
> search them but they still need to be rendered to a browser quickly?
> How much development effort is usually involved in integrating Lucene
> with an application?
>