Hi Erik, While I have no doubts that Solr is a capable product I would like to point out that it may not necessarily the question of the fact that Sorl can talk to .NET (anything can talk to anything when you know what you are doing) but perhaps more a problem of the comfort level that an individual may have in committing to support a product based on a platform (Java) that they don't use regularly.
What attracted me to Lucene.NET is not the fact that it is based on Lucene which is a top product but primarily the fact that it uses technology that I am comfortable on a day to day basis, is built using source code that I am used to reading and doesn't require me to install "Yet Another Framework" on a production server and expect an MCSE (who openly admit being allergic to Java if only for "religious" reasons) to then administer it. Ed, There was a few years back a gentleman that assembled a lucenenet site but unfortunately it no longer exists and that site did have several examples on how to use IFilter to index just about anything and store it in Lucene. Lucene, however, is not exactly what I would call a search infrastructure [quickly puts on bulletproof vest and prepares to dodge bullets and random objects] (it does not do the indexing) but a very well designed repository (database) and search engine. Beyond storing content and allowing you to search it, it's responsibilities stop there. However from what I've seen with past source code IFilter is quite easy to implement. I'm sure if you use a combination of the Adapter and Strategy patterns this can become trivial in any language. Karell Ste-Marie C.I.O. - BrainBank Inc -----Original Message----- From: Erik Hatcher [mailto:erik.hatc...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2010 4:49 AM To: lucene-net-dev@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Question Ed - that's a reasonable critique, but the API is practically the same between the Lucene.Net and Lucene Java. There is a section contributed by George in the upcoming 2nd edition of Lucene in Action - it's short and says basically that. But, rather than buy a commercial search engine, consider Solr! I don't want to come here and steal any of Lucene.Net's thunder by mentioning Solr, as no doubt Lucene.Net is the right fit for many projects. Solr, though, is so much more than just Lucene, providing enterprisey features (replication, distributed search, facets, and more) that just can't be trivially/naively built on top of any flavor of Lucene. And Solr is easy interfaced with .NET as a client. Of course the hurdle then is "does Solr, a Java-based app, fit into the operations of your deployment environment?". It's another technology to add if the shop is purely .NET currently. But then again, it literally does run everywhere quite easily. Erik
