[sword-devel] Lucene, new version soon

[DM Smith]

FYI,

Lucene (Java) will be releasing version 2.3 soon. This release will  
mark yet again a significant performance increase. The JSword index  
code running under Lucene 1.4.3 took > 5 minutes to index the ESV.  
Currently, it takes ~1 minute using 2.2. With 2.3, it will take ~25  
seconds.

The next release will be 2.4, will be a preparatory release for the 3x  
series, introducing the 3.x APIs. Shortly after 2.4 will be 2.9, whose  
purpose is to serve as a beta for 3.0, marking old APIs as deprecated.

The key difference between 2.9 and 3.0 will be removal of deprecated  
interfaces and a Java 5.0 requirement.

With regard to compatibility, each release in a major series (e.g.  
1.x, 2.x, 3.x) guarantees full backward compatibility. When going from  
1.x to 2.x or 2.x to 3.x, backward compatibility is maintained for  
file formats. This is significant because 3.x is planned to be unable  
to read 1.x indexes.

JSword will probably upgrade shortly after each release of Lucene, but  
as long as we support MacOSX 10.3 we will also be supporting Java  
1.4.2. And that means not going to Lucene 3.x unless it can also run  
under Java 1.4.2. I think I will be, with the support of the Lucene  
team, be maintaining a parallel Java 1.4.2 down graded port of Lucene.

With regard to cLucene, this is important because cLucene is still at  
1.4.3 compatibility, even after Lucene 2.0 was released 19 months ago  
(May 2006). There are only a few active developers on cLucene and  
while much has been done to port 2.0, there still remains much to be  
done. It still cannot read or create a 2.x index.

Working together for Christ's Kingdom,
	DM