(...) the point being
that once they've got you using a monolithic application, it's a lot
harder to stop using the whole thing all at once, then it would be for you
to stop using 1 of N mini-applications they provide.
Well, FAST is composed of many small, modular products that can be
replaced by other (open source) parts. It is not monolithic. The first
time you install it, it might appear to be just one giant beast. However
it is not.
I ramble about this to try and explain why Solr may not be what you would
consider a "complete package" at the moment .... and why it may never
reach the state you think would make it a "complete package" ... because
there are a lot of people out there who don't need it to be -- it would be
hard to be a full blown GUI configurable, web crawling, document
detecting, customizable schema based application and still allow for
people to use small pieces of it.
I am not arguing on this. I think my point didn't get through, then.
Compare this to Linux distributions. People still use them, right? What
about an "enterprise search distro"? That is exactly what some
commercial vendors offer, only far less elegant than anything containing
Lucene et al would probably be.
To put it another way: it's a lot easier for people to put reusable
components with clean APIs together in interesting ways, then it is for
people to extract reusable components with clean APIs from a monolithic
application.
Yes, I agree completely, and the strength is exactly what you say - they
focus on doing a small thing very well. I believe this fact would make
such a "search distribution" even more appealing.
Another approach to achieve the same goal though, could be just to
bundle a customized system as a virtual machine snapshot, but that could
very well be too limiting.
Eivind
