[Xapian-discuss] New to Xapian (coming from Lucene)

[Jeff Anderson]

> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 12:15:59 +0100
> From: James Aylett <james-xapian at tartarus.org>
> Hi, Jeff. I think you're running into (understandable) confusion here
> because of differences in naming conventions between Xapian and
> Lucene.

Perhaps that was because the Lucene docs were more accessible than the
Xapian docs. Sorry to sound mean, but the fact is i found Lucene to be
much easier to understand and to actually use.


> Terms come in two forms: postings (which have positional information)
> and "plain" terms (which don't). So you can do:

I still don't understand the need to specifiy a numeric position,
unless this determines some kind of "boost" on the term. In Lucene and
Kinosearch, the coder can refer to items by a key name, and be able to
retrieve pieces of data to display in the search results by those key
names. Leave the numbers to the mathematicians! :P


> The document data is simply a chunk of text or binary data which is
> stored alongside the document. It is most commonly used to implement
> what we call FIELDS as name-value pairs ... Xapian doesn't provide
> any support itself for doing this, but in Perl it's pretty easy to do (you
> could, in fact, serialise a Perl hash to make life really easy).

And this is what really gets to me. I just don't agree with this
philosphy, as i have already stated a few times previously. As i also
stated earlier that i decided to switch to Kinosearch. No offense, but
it's just a better fit for my needs.