It's been weeks now that there were talks on this list about how the future of Lucene could look like. We all agreed that the core engine is solid and only needs little enhancements.
However, we also agreed that in order to leverage Lucene to a higher level we will need a best-practices implementation of the most common cases the Lucene engine is used for. Since then, there were a lot of talks off-list among a group of people who mostly contributed code to the lucene-sandbox area, about how these parts could be brought together to form a greater whole. The result has now emerged, after weeks of discussion, in a proposal that we would like to discuss with the rest of you before spending even more weeks arguing about details. We currently regard it as a sandbox project. It consists of two parts: The Lucene Framework and the Lucene Retrieval Machine. The latter based upon the former, we call the whole package "LARM" (which is by coincidence also the name of the old crawler. We haven't figured out yet what the "A" stands for, though...). The mission we came up with reads like this: "The Lucene Retrieval Machine forms a complete and highly scalable search solution for end-users of the Lucene search engine: Capable of intelligently indexing data from various sources, preprocessing of source documents configurable by the end user, up to a best-practice implementation of online search functionality. It will be based on the Lucene Framework that provides implementations for data aggregation and indexing functionality utilizing the Lucene indexing API, while being easily extensible and constructible by application developers or researchers." As it turns out, much of the functionality we would regard to be an essential core of this search engine server (lifecycle management, configuration etc.) is already provided by the Apache Avalon project, especially by the Phoenix meta-server. Avalon comes with a different (and therefore a little more complicated) philosophy most of us are used to, but I have already pitched a note on their mailing list asking for support, and received an enormous response. We would like to get in contact with them - perhaps a viable collaboration can emerge. The rest of the documents can be downloaded from CVS from jakarta-lucene-sandbox/projects/larm/docs Regards, Clemens Marschner (with Otis Gospodnetic, Peter Carlson, and Kelvin Tan) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
