: Thanks - that helps, and ideally should help with adoption questions here. : You said "most cases" - I've read something about "solr extends lucene" in : the docs. Are there some specific solr-only bits of functionality that : would preclude vanilla-lucene code from accessing solr-created indexes?
the notion that Solr "extends" Lucene is primarily in terms of the HTTP API it provides, but there is lots of code in the Solr code base that extends the fuctionality of Lucene in various ways ... FunctionQueries for example, and support for them in the SolrQueryParser (which is a subclass of the Lucene QueryParser). If your primary concern is that you want to allow people writting apps using the raw Lucene APIs want to be able to access your index, your only real concern is in how you design your schema ... whatever analyzers you use on text fields will need to be available to the other clients, if you use the any of the complex field types, (sortable ints, dates, etc) then those other apps will need to know how to convert values before querying those fields. in addition to the solr.war, the solr distributions include a jar containing all of the stock code that ships with Slr -- primarily for compiling against when building plugins, but that same code JAR could be used by standalone Lucene apps to access the various TokenFilters and FieldTypes that Solr provides if you use them in your schema. -Hoss
