I have a web application written in Perl. My search requirement is to index a file system / on fly document which can contains file types i.e.; HTML, MS Office, PDF documents etc and then perform a full-text search. I have already investigated Apache Solr works fine with sample data. Now I got to know about Apache Lucy and wondering if this is the right candidate for my Perl based application. One of the concern with Apache Lucy this is that there is no update on CPAN after Dec 2014. Not sure if this is actively maintained especially what is the progress with integration with Lucene 5.3. I need suggestion on below points:
- Is Apache Lucy is almost similar to Apache Lucene?
- Is Apache Lucy production ready?
- Any tentative planning of new release of Apache Lucy.
Thanks,
Okay, I'm going to share some of my experience with using Lucy.
When Lucy builds an index it creates many index files in a directory which you have declared. Only one user can read, write and delete from the index.If the index is to be shared with multiple users, then file locking needs to be applied. When one user is accessing the index, the other users are locked out until the user that's currently accessing the index is done. This maybe an issue when there is a high volume of users wanting to access the index.
Lucy does not support Integer types, so if you make a query using numbers, Lucy will treat it as a string. This also means Lucy has no number query function operators like greater, less than, etc. It's also impossible to work with dates and time. Solr on the other hand allows you to use integers and all the available query functions with integers, dates, time, etc.
Lucy has practically no online community support, not to mention lack of documentation. Solr on the other hand is the most popular Lucene based enterprise search engine. It has a vast amount of community support, very comprehensive documentation and tutorial.
The only issue with solr is security. When you create an index with solr, it is loaded on to a shared tenancy server. This means anyone can access your data. It is up to you to secure your data. The good news is there a some plugins that allows you to do so.
In my opinion Lucy is a good, fast little search engine if you are using it primarily for text searches and you have a site with not a lot of traffic.