Does Zend Lucene need Java Lucene?

Question

When implementing Zend Lucene, do we need to install Java on our server or not?

Answer 1

Although I have not used it, it appears that you do not need Java to use the Zend_Search_Lucene component. According to the documentation, Zend_Search_Lucene is a fully PHP implementation of Lucene.

However, there is support for interoperability between the Java indexes and the PHP indexes.

Answer 2

Zend implementation is the port of java to PHP of Lucene. This is a great approach of Zend.

But the PHP version will lack for big indexes. Remember that if you have a big index, php will need load it each time you call the script that make the search/insert into Lucene. The java version, load the index when the JVM starts and keep it in memory to use it.