Lucere project announcement

[Troy Howard <th...@gmail.com>]

All,

The recent discussions on this mailing list have shown a few things to be true:

- Lucene.Net is definitely still a thriving project with strong
leadership represented by George and DIGY
- The community surrounding the project is vocal, vibrant and filled
with ideas and motivation to help
- There is a strong interest in seeing Lucene.Net continue as a
line-by-line port of Java Lucene:
  - It's faster and more manageable to make releases because code can
be automatically converted
  - Retains all the excellence of the Java Lucene project
  - Provides end users with a wealth of existing knowledge and support
surrounding the Java Lucene project
- There is a strong interest in have a more ".Net style" port of Lucene
  - Many users feel using the Java-idiomatic API is unwieldy
  - There is a desire to see the code take advantage of valuable .Net
framework features that do not exist in Java
  - Performance can be improve on the .NET runtime by refactoring

I'm very glad to see George has picked up the ball to keep Lucene.Net
going and applaud his commitment to keeping the project focused on
it's stated goals: a line-by-line port of Java Lucene that releases in
sync the main project.

I'm also glad to see that a number of people have started contributing
in meaningful ways to the Lucene.Net project, working through the
action list George posted a few days ago. I would like to
optimistically think that crisis is well on it's way to being averted.

I think this is a good sign that Lucene.Net will remain a vital and
active project as part of the ASF.

With that said, I'd like to announce Lucere, a new Lucene-based .NET project.

The goal of Lucere is to create a "conceptual port" of Lucene for .NET
as contrasted with the current "syntactic port" approach taken by
Lucene.Net. We will start by creating a ground-up re-write of the
current feature set of Java Lucene 3.0.2 that is optimized for .NET.
This is a non-trivial task and may cause our initial release cycle to
be slow. Beyond that we will be spending a certain amount of time
upfront to design the API and architecture. While building our initial
architecture and design we want to take into consideration the many
different ideas that our community has to offer, producing what will
hopefully be a full featured, flexible library that integrates well
into a variety of kinds of applications.

For more information, please see the project site at:

http://lucere.codeplex.com

We hope that the next few weeks will represent a lively discussion
from members of the Lucene.Net community about the idea of a new
project, our goals and the design and architecture of Lucere. In order
to keep discussion focused for both projects, please consider joining
the Lucere mailing list by sending a quick email to:

lucere+subscribe@googlegroups.com

Or, if you'd rather not use email, feel free to visit the discussion
forums on the project site at:

http://lucere.codeplex.com/discussions

Hopefully there's enough interest in both concepts such that both
projects may continue to move forward and thrive. We fully intend to
have our cake and eat it too. :)

Thanks,
Troy

Re: Lucere project announcement

[Peter Mateja <pe...@gmail.com>]

I'm a bit concerned that there's going to be a fragmentation of effort
surrounding Lucene.Net, Lucere, and Aimee, LINQ to Lucene (
http://linqtolucene.codeplex.com/, though this appears to be dead) causing
more confusion than not.  I do agree that initially, Lucene.Net should
remain a line by line port.  As much as the Java idioms pulled into
Lucene.Net can be frustrating to work with in the context of standard .Net
development, I think it's more important to have something that works now,
and works exactly the same as the base Lucene.  As discussed ad nauseum in
other forums this has several key benefits.

That said, I do long for the elegance of recent .Net language constructs and
framework features.  I've heard discussion of trying to build a .Net "layer"
on top of Lucene.Net.  Having dug into the Lucene.Net code a bit, I'd have
to say that this will not be an easy task.  I'd wager that quite a bit of
the desired .Net-ification of Lucene.Net will result from better automated
conversion methods, which would really hinge on the direction taken by the
Lucene.Net project, not Lucere.

One interesting direction to take, might be to transition some of the core
classes in Lucene.Net into partial classes, allowing additional additional
class tooling outside of the Lucene.Net core project.  This is perhaps a
naive suggestion, so if anyone has already considered this route, let me
know.

Peter Mateja
peter.mateja@gmail.com


On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 3:33 AM, Troy Howard <th...@gmail.com> wrote:

> All,
>
> The recent discussions on this mailing list have shown a few things to be
> true:
>
> - Lucene.Net is definitely still a thriving project with strong
> leadership represented by George and DIGY
> - The community surrounding the project is vocal, vibrant and filled
> with ideas and motivation to help
> - There is a strong interest in seeing Lucene.Net continue as a
> line-by-line port of Java Lucene:
>  - It's faster and more manageable to make releases because code can
> be automatically converted
>  - Retains all the excellence of the Java Lucene project
>  - Provides end users with a wealth of existing knowledge and support
> surrounding the Java Lucene project
> - There is a strong interest in have a more ".Net style" port of Lucene
>  - Many users feel using the Java-idiomatic API is unwieldy
>  - There is a desire to see the code take advantage of valuable .Net
> framework features that do not exist in Java
>  - Performance can be improve on the .NET runtime by refactoring
>
> I'm very glad to see George has picked up the ball to keep Lucene.Net
> going and applaud his commitment to keeping the project focused on
> it's stated goals: a line-by-line port of Java Lucene that releases in
> sync the main project.
>
> I'm also glad to see that a number of people have started contributing
> in meaningful ways to the Lucene.Net project, working through the
> action list George posted a few days ago. I would like to
> optimistically think that crisis is well on it's way to being averted.
>
> I think this is a good sign that Lucene.Net will remain a vital and
> active project as part of the ASF.
>
> With that said, I'd like to announce Lucere, a new Lucene-based .NET
> project.
>
> The goal of Lucere is to create a "conceptual port" of Lucene for .NET
> as contrasted with the current "syntactic port" approach taken by
> Lucene.Net. We will start by creating a ground-up re-write of the
> current feature set of Java Lucene 3.0.2 that is optimized for .NET.
> This is a non-trivial task and may cause our initial release cycle to
> be slow. Beyond that we will be spending a certain amount of time
> upfront to design the API and architecture. While building our initial
> architecture and design we want to take into consideration the many
> different ideas that our community has to offer, producing what will
> hopefully be a full featured, flexible library that integrates well
> into a variety of kinds of applications.
>
> For more information, please see the project site at:
>
> http://lucere.codeplex.com
>
> We hope that the next few weeks will represent a lively discussion
> from members of the Lucene.Net community about the idea of a new
> project, our goals and the design and architecture of Lucere. In order
> to keep discussion focused for both projects, please consider joining
> the Lucere mailing list by sending a quick email to:
>
> lucere+subscribe@googlegroups.com <lu...@googlegroups.com>
>
> Or, if you'd rather not use email, feel free to visit the discussion
> forums on the project site at:
>
> http://lucere.codeplex.com/discussions
>
> Hopefully there's enough interest in both concepts such that both
> projects may continue to move forward and thrive. We fully intend to
> have our cake and eat it too. :)
>
> Thanks,
> Troy
>