Based on the following characteristics of my web app, does it make sense for me to use Hibernate Search? Can Hibernate Search make implementing full-text search "easier" and "quicker" than traditional Lucene + JDBC? I have no information retrieval knowledge/experience, what's the learning curve with Hibernate Search? Lastly, as the web app grows can Hibernate Search grow with it?

Basic web app characteristics:

• Uses ORM -- JPA 2.0 (Hibernate implementation)
• Uses Spring Framework (Predominately for DI)
• Uses MySql as backend db

Yes.



Under the hood hibernate search is using Lucene as the search engine, Hibernate Search can provide access to the underlying search engine should you ever need to, however you can happily work with Hibernate Search. There is a wealth of information available on the web on hibernate search and also there is a fantastic book Hibernate Search in Action. Also should you encounter any issues or require some assistance then the forum is also a great place.


Yes. There are a few Hibernate Search back end implementations that provide a means of Hibernate Search to scale, please see online documentation.

I worked on a few projects using Hibernate Search and I can honestly say it is a great framework. It took me a week to get full text search for my previous company and they had a really crazy domain model. So my recommendation is that play around it with and knock up a POC and get a feel for it. If you want to know more about Lucene then I would say look at Lucene in Action and obviously look at their website.

Hope this helps

Thanks for sharing your experiences, it was very insightful. However, I do have a follow-up question -- How do other offerings such as Solr and Compass, compare to Hibernate Search, in terms of functionality and ease of use/maintenance?

Hi

There is a topic that was posted recently about Hibernate Search vs Solr:

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1001765

I haven't used Compass although I have heard some stuff about it but to be honest when I looked at HS I found it really easy to learn and the online documentation/book. When I had any problems I found the support from the forums really good. It would definitely be interesting to get a comparison between the HS and Compass (maybe something I'll have a go at doing, or maybe if you fancy doing it then it would be great to find out).

Amin

AFAIK Compass is not going to be developed further, the author is now focusing on a new cool project.
Compass has been more feature-rich than Hibernate Search, especially as it integrated in more projects while Hibernate Search does focus only on Hibernate/JPA or Infinispan.
Feature-richness also comes with some complexity, if you're new to information retrieval then I think HS is a good bet as it makes it very easy for beginners; but it won't prevent you to use advanced features in case you need them in future.

Regarding JPA2, I don't think Compass handles that.