[Xapian-discuss] Lucene & Solr

[Henry]

Quoting "Charlie Hull" <charlie at juggler.net>:

> Can anyone help? I'm looking for both differences between the two
> systems and perhaps the reasons why you chose Xapian in the end.

Our searching occurs on a cluster of many machines.  Having to  
maintain *yet another* complicated and resource hungry system (Java  
VM) seemed stupid and wasteful to us.  I'm going to get flamed :), but  
using Java for anything is like using an aircraft carrier to dig a  
furrow on the beach.  Java == better designed PHP.

We naturally gravitate to any system which is coded in C/C++ with  
higher level interpreted language bindings (Perl in our case, other  
ankle-biters enjoy Python or Ruby for some obscure reason ;)  *No*  
other high-level language is faster than C/C++.  For us, Search is all  
about performance (then nice stuff such as sorting, etc).

Think about it:  why doesn't Google use Java as their search engine?

Finally, we chose Xapian since it's mature (just works), has a Perl  
interface,  is still under active development, the docs are good and  
there's an active and friendly community.

Cheers
Henry