: - Does Solr create its own index or is it a wrapper on lucene index(i et its : the latter)
"Lucene" in the context of this discussion is a Java Library. Solr is an application written in Java -- Solr uses the Lucene library to create an index. : - If answer to the prev Q is NO, then how is the SOlr index diff from the : lucene index. the index is a Lucene index, which can be read by any application that uses the Lucene library -- one caveat to this is that depending on the FieldTypes you tell Solr to use, the field values may be encoded in ways that other applications will not understand. several people have used Solr to search indexes built by their own custom code, or by nutch (and vice versa) : - IndexReader and IndexWriter will no longer be used in the SOlr programs - : yes/no ? Solr provides an HTTP API for indexing and searching data. your application can be written in any language you want, and communicates with Solr over HTTP -- it can get the responses back in a variety of formats. : - some documentation on using remote indexes with SOlr ( also faceted : searching) you have to elaborate on what you mean by "remote indexes" ... Solr as a "web service" can be as "remote" as you want it to be from your clients (as long as your clients can reach it over the network using HTTP) but it accesses the underlying index using the filesystem. If you mean you want Solr to be able to access the unerlying index across a network in real time -- that is not suported. You can however use the replication scripts to create you index on one "master" machine and then have any number of "slave" machines pull it -- Solr can then begin to seamlessly use the new index while it finishs existing requests using the old index. -Hoss
