We have been reading about how companies are using open source technology to power their products and projects, but we rarely hear from the creators of open source themselves. InfoQ has an article that focuses on the newest headline, “On Lucene.Net: Becoming a Top-Level Apache Project and Its Future.” Lucene.Net is a C# port on Lucene’s text search index library and it has become part of the incubator. Upon this new change, Apache has made it a top-level project. The article summarizes an interview with Prescott Nasser of the Apache team.
Nasser commented on Lucene.Net:
The Lucene.Net team is preparing to release 3.0.3 soon, each version being on par with its corresponding Lucene/Java version, according to Prescott Nasser, committer on the project, interviewed by InfoQ:
’3.0.3 will be feature parity with Java Lucene 3.0.3. There is a relationship – our numbers will match theirs. Our Lucene.Net.Contrib packages will likely not have feature parity, because our community is smaller and keeping that up to date is a bit harder.’
Currently, the team has two .NET releases, one including support for generics, but that will probably change in the future:
We’ve talked a lot about how to make the API conform to closer to .NET conventions (rather than Java conventions). The generics branch (2.9.4g) was really using a lot more of those conventions than 2.9.4. I think going forward we are trying to first get up to speed with Java Lucene, and secondarily focus on making it more .NET like. These will probably merge – or more likely 2.9.4g will die on the vine and the trunk will incorporate these features.
While the project has top priority it does not have a deadline. One good thing about open source is that while people eagerly await for the next upgrade, there aren’t corporate deadlines. The developers can spend time ironing out the wrinkles before deployment. LucidWorks, a leader in building solutions based upon Apache Lucene, will incorporate the changes to the platform and make their enterprise, Cloud, and Big Data search applications even more powerful.
Whitney Grace, September 6, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.