Do you want to embed an index into your application, e.g. as a desktop app? Use Lucene. Is search basically the whole of your app? Perhaps use Lucene.
Do you want you offer search as a service? Do you want to be able to arbitrarily scale your index (beyond the number of documents a single index can handle, or beyond the load a single server can handle), do you want to offer search services to a number of other servers? Then use Solr. Once you get that Lucene is a library you embed into your java app, and Solr is a server that you connect to from other server(s), you will hopefully be able to work out which is more appropriate. If you consider using Lucene in the latter scenario, you will probably end up rewriting a lot of what Solr does anyway. Upayavira On Tue, Feb 12, 2013, at 08:26 PM, Glen Newton wrote: > Is there a page on the wiki that points out the use cases (or the > features) that are best suited for Lucene adoption, and those best > suited for SOLR adoption? > > -Glen > > On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 3:11 PM, Shawn Heisey <s...@elyograg.org> wrote: > > 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 > > > > > > -- > - > http://zzzoot.blogspot.com/ > -
