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I can't seem to find any recent talk on the choice. Back in '06 there was criticism on Hibernate Search as being incomplete and not being ready to compete with Compass, is it now? Has anyone used both and have some perspective on making the decision.

I am developing a web app in Java in my free time, its just me so I'm looking to cut corners everywhere possible while minimizing the effect on the end product. Having said that the searching capabilities of my project are priority one! I have spent a good deal of time making the database model to back the system. The ability to get the user what they're looking for is what will set my app apart. So, speed is expendable ...obviously to a reasonable degree.

Here are my current thoughts on the technologies for this app, and if you see any glaring newb mistakes be gentle ...I'm an expert at nothing.

DB: PostgreSQL
Platform: Java
Frameworks: Spring, Hibernate, Seam

Obviously, I've chosen all free (as in beer) technologies and ones that as far as I can tell play nice together. So what do you guys think, Compass or Hibernate Search to round things out?

-Nomad311

OldTroll
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LostNomad311
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  • Interesting question, I'm really wondering how they really differ as they are both built on top of Lucene. Any references on the criticism of '06? – Pascal Thivent Nov 10 '09 at 06:21

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<Careful. Biased person here: I am the project lead of Hibernate Search and author of Hibernate Search in Action by Manning>

If you are targeting Hibernate as your persistence provider, I think you are better off using Hibernate Search as the integration is very smooth (configuration, entity discovery down the the same APIs and programamtic model). If you want to index a lot of "stuffs" that are not in your database, then Compass is a better fit.

We are working on Hibernate Search 3.2 at the moment: our road map is here

Pascal Thivent
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Emmanuel Bernard
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    Ohoh, we have Hibernate Search Project Lead himself now! Interesting :) – Pascal Thivent Nov 10 '09 at 12:56
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    Weird, I did put a disclamer and it does not show up. I guess stackoverflow does not like lt and gt So let me put it again: Careful. Biased person here: I am the project lead of Hibernate Search and author of Hibernate Search in Action by Manning – Emmanuel Bernard Nov 10 '09 at 13:26
  • I did assume that Hibernate Search would be the easiest as far as integration goes, but I did say that the search functionality was number one on my list so thats not gonna be a deal breaker. Something I would like to know from you is: are the dicussions that I've read from 2-3 years ago still valid (including the ones you've had with Shay)? Has either technology made any significant changes since? BTW I would like to thank you for your work regardless of which I use; as I plan this project I'm realizing just how much work and complication is involved with a decent search engine! – LostNomad311 Nov 10 '09 at 16:21
  • Yes there has been lots of changes since then :) Esp 3.1 has been focused on polishing the 3.0 features, perf improvements and we have started the abstraction work necessary to use Hibernate Search outside Hibernate Core. It's better to list what you need or think you would miss so we can tell you if the tool is suited for your needs. – Emmanuel Bernard Nov 11 '09 at 10:42
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Hibernate Search is a complete product, and it's based on Lucene, which is one of the fastest open source search engine out here.

As an example, some benchmarks:

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/07/06/131243/Open-Source-Search-Engine-Benchmarks

Plus, it's fully integrated with Seam and Hibernate (look at the example in the Seam dist).

I suggest you to be more specific about:

Hibernate Search as being incomplete

I'd like to know in which part it is incomplete.

Luca Molteni
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    Compass is based on Lucene too so this is not discriminating. – Pascal Thivent Nov 10 '09 at 11:25
  • Ok so there's not a speed problem, since both of his alternatives are based on the same engine. – Luca Molteni Nov 10 '09 at 13:28
  • Was incomplete ...I don't have the same links I was reading last night but a quick google search brought me this one where Emmanuel himself said that Hibernate didn't have the feature set that Compass did back then: http://relation.to/2221.lace – LostNomad311 Nov 10 '09 at 16:12
  • Also check out this ...Emmanual and Shay have a back and forth about their technologies: http://jroller.com/kimchy/entry/hibernate_search_lucene – LostNomad311 Nov 10 '09 at 16:14
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Compass is no more as of elasticsearch is new one after compass. So I think better to use some stable one. (Possibly Hibernate Search)

ILYAS
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