Which one is better for efficient free text search, Hibernate Search or Lucene?

Question

We are developing a web application using Spring MVC, Spring and Hibernate.

We need to add efficient free text search capabilities to our applications. For this we are thinking of using either Hibernate Search (it uses Lucene under the hood) or directly lucene.

What is the best option for us as we are already using hibernate in our application? What are the pros and cons of one over the other?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You said it yourself - you'll be using Lucene one way or the other.

The raw Lucene API isn't very easy to use. It's much more low-level than Hibernate Search. if you're already using Hibernate, then it's a no-brainer - use Hibernate Search to implement your text search functionality.

Answer 2

disclaimer: I'm one of the developers of Hibernate Search.

The goal of the project is not to compete with Lucene nor Solr, but to facilitate as much as possible integration with Hibernate applications, to avoid having to maintain the two worlds in sync and duplicate all mapping and CRUD operations.

While we provide some common helpers and a nice encapsulation, Hibernate Search can also hand you over a direct reference to the Lucene API, so in case you find yourself needing to use the "raw" Lucene API you will never be stuck. Also for writing to the index Hibernate Search provides a common pattern which will solve most of known requirements, but in case you have very non-standard requirements you can get full control of the written Documents.

Solr is a good alternative, but as it is a separate server you have to interact with it via REST APIs which is quite different, with it's pros and cons. Having a second service to manage is not always wanted, and of course the remote invocations will never be as efficient as direct references to Lucene and to all it's internal filters and caches. Not all functionality of Lucene can be exposed via a remote API, and if you need to do some "low level" operation, if this is not implemented in Solr you won't be able to do it (without patching Solr). Still Solr is very cute, especially when you want to share the index with other non-Java applications, and so we might add a Solr backend for Hibernate Search to eventually keep a Solr server in synch (especially if there's interest for it, and possibly some help).

Finally, the Lucene API is really hard core stuff. We spend a lot of effort to make the best use of it to provide top performance while exposing a stable API to people using Hibernate Search, basically until now all releases have been backwards compatible to provide a "drop-in" performance boost to use latest greatest tricks from Lucene - which actually changes API quite often; these changes are always exciting, but be prepared to maintain that in your application if you don't use a proper abstraction.

Answer 3

The other way of using Lucene is to get the middlman API which is known as SOLR. SOLR will connect to Lucene and perfom HTTP calls for search. Please note that you will need to build and Parse the XML what Solr consumes. All the functionality of Lucene is exponse via SOLR and should be really helpful.