Lucene and ... object persistence

This article seems interesting, opening some kind of a new direction for object persistance.

article

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Thanks for the link Ali.

Originally posted by Ali Pope:
This article seems interesting, opening some kind of a new direction for object persistance.

article

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./pope

This is certainly a clever way to use Lucene. My main critique of the implementation details is the use of QueryParser for non-human-entered queries. There are many strange things that can occur between parsing and analyzing the query expression that are best avoided by forming queries directly with the API whenever possible - even if that means working with an analyzer directly as QueryParser does under the covers.

Erik, as I already stated, I am a very novice to Lucene and so I would very much appreciate if you can detail a little bit your comment.

tia
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Originally posted by Erik Hatcher:

There are many strange things that can occur between parsing and analyzing the query expression that are best avoided by forming queries directly with the API whenever possible - even if that means working with an analyzer directly as QueryParser does under the covers.

This can be a bit confusing, so bear with me. Lucene includes a parser to parse text expressions like "this AND that" into a query. You can qualify the field to search on using syntax like "field1:value OR field2:value" and so on. The query parser syntax is detailed
here. When the expression is parsed, it also runs the analyzer on each piece of the expression. (we won't go into the analysis details here - its a whole chapters worth!).

A Lucene Query can be constructed through the API, and bypass the parsing/analysis steps.

You can aggregate parsed expressions with API-created queries using BooleanQuery.

How to actually build queries in your system really depends on what you want to do, but I cringe when I see code that string concatenates clauses in expression syntax to be parsed when it could be done more rigorously and less room for error using other techniques.

Many thanks Erik, now it sounds more clear. I would sau that this is somewhere in the field of string queries vs programatic queries building (f.e. Hibernate simple string queries vs Criteria objects).

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