Search-Enable Your Application with Lucene
By: Craig Walls
The e-commerce Web site that I work on has seen several incarnations of its search feature. We started with plain vanilla SQL using "like" clauses, but this didn't perform well and left a lot to be desired in language features such as stemming (e.g., "paint" = "painter" = "painting") and synonym matching (e.g., "cat" = "feline"). Next we tried an off-the-shelf solution. This addressed our efficiency and language demands, but it was ridden with strange quirks and we were limited in how much we could customize its behavior.
Then we discovered Lucene. Lucene is an open-source search framework from Apache's Jakarta project. As a framework, Lucene provides you with the building blocks you need to build a search engine that meets your specific searching requirements. Lucene is flexible, fully customizable, and amazingly fast.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Java HotSpot VM
The questions and answers are divided into the following topics.
The Java HotSpot VM Architecture and Use