On Friday 29 August 2003 10:02, Terry Steichen wrote: > I agree. One problem, however, that new (and not-so-new) Lucene users face > is a learning curve when they want to get past the simplest and most > obvious uses of Lucene. For example, I don't think any of the docs mention > the fact that you can't combine a phrase and a wildcard query. Other > things that are obviously quite well understood by many members of the > list, are still less-than-clear to others. For example, I found (and still > find) it a bit difficult to find concrete examples/advice of how to get > good benefit from filters. > > My whole point is that this is a *very* powerful and flexible technology. > But I think it's often very difficult for those most experienced in using > Lucene to fully appreciate how it looks from the "newbie" point of view.
I agree completely. Perhaps I worded my reply badly; I didn't mean to sound hostile towards new users at all -- after all I consider myself to be one (I just happened to work on simple improvements to QueryParser and learnt how it works). I wish documentation was more complete; perhaps some section could list common workarounds or insights. And perhaps incompatibility of phrase and wild card queries could be added to document that lists current limitations. I guess the reason I think it's valuable to document the flexibility of query construction is that I have been working on something similar (although working with database queries) in a system I'm working on, and I have also seen systems that have query syntax that's too intertwined with backend implementation (for example, while Hibernate is a good ORM, its queries don't seem to have backend independent intermediate representation... which makes it hard to develop different kinds of backends). So, it's useful to know that there are 2 levels of interfaces to Lucene's query functionality. -+ Tatu +- --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
