On 2/12/2013 11:19 AM, JohnRodey wrote:
So I have had a fair amount of experience using Solr. However on a separate project we are considering just using Lucene directly, which I have never done. I am trying to avoid finding out late that Lucene doesn't offer what we need and being like "aw snap, it doesn't support geospatial" (or highlighting, or dynamic fields, or etc...). I am more curious about core index and search features, and not as much with sharding, cloud features, different client languages and so on.
Because Solr is written using the Lucene API, if you want to use Lucene, you can do anything Solr can, plus plenty of things that Solr can't -- but for many of those, you'd have to write the code yourself. That's the key difference -- with Solr, a HUGE amount of coding is already done for you, you just have to put a few easy-to-debug client API calls in your code.
From my perspective as a user with some Java coding ability but not any true experience with large-scale development: If your development team is ready and capable of writing Lucene code, then it would be better to use Solr instead, and if there's something you need that Solr can't do, put your development team to work writing the required plugin. They would likely spend far less time doing that than writing an entire search system using Lucene.
Thanks, Shawn
