Lucene.Net and incubation status

Question

I evaluate options to make our search more powerful on our .Net website. I need to find out if we purchase software / hardware, such as the Google Search Appliance (GSA), or develop a solution using an infrastructure like Lucene.Net

We are a startup, and the GSA provides many good features out of the box, but we need two blocks, and the second as a backup / dev environment, and everything starts to get expensive .....

We have used the full text of SQL Server in the past, but we strive to provide a very intuitive search such as "Googlesque" on our site, and we have tried our best to do whatever we want with SQL Server.

But I'm not sure what the “incubator status” actually means for the Lucene.Net project. Should I consider a project that is in incubator status? Isn't it active? Will it at some point become more active or archived?

thanks

Answer 1

I'm not sure what the “incubator status” for the Lucene.Net project actually implies

This means that the project, which is an external project, is evaluated by apache to be included in the "stable" apache - I think they should make sure that the processes are correct, that there is no patented code, etc.

It has no reflection in the code . The Lucene.NET string is stable (v2.1), and the downloadable version (v2.0) is also stable, but not "stable" or updated.

If you have more questions, I suggest you go to the mailing list ( http://incubator.apache.org/lucene.net/ ) and ask George or DIGY. I use it in commercial projects - both internal ( http://www.topgear.com for example) and packaged (not sure what I can say, but this is an email archiver) with 1.xx, and it works GREAT.

I would advise you to take a look at Solra. It uses Java Lucene and is basically an external search server, but you insert information into it, rather than wasting your site. This is on the apache lucene website.

Answer 2

Lucene.NET is an active and updated project. The fact that it is hosted as an incubator under Apache is a good thing, not a negative one. As you can read on the Apache incubation site, Lucene.NET is awaiting review and final approval, but this does not mean that it is unstable or not supported. As for your main question, I think that using it for the development stage would be an acceptable choice if you are a startup.

Answer 3

Log4net was incubated in the Apache project for a long time. It is still recommended and widely used. I would be fine using Lucene.Net for several reasons. First, like @ ste09, it says that incubation is a good thing. Secondly, Lucene (Java version) is a full-fledged project in Apache. Like log4j / log4net, I think it is very good for Lucene.Net to do this from an incubation state.