Preface

I first started with Lucene about a year after the first edition of Lucene in Action was published. I already had experience building search engines, but didn’t know much about Lucene in particular. So, I picked up a copy of Lucene in Action by Erik and Otis and read it, cover to cover, and I was hooked!

As I used Lucene, I found small improvements here and there, so I started contributing small patches, updating javadocs, discussing topics on Lucene’s mailing lists, and so forth. I eventually became an active core committer and PMC member, committing many changes over the years.

It has now been five-and-a-half years since the first edition of Lucene in Action was published, which is practically an eternity in the fast-paced world of open source development! Lucene has gone through two major releases, and now has all sorts of new functionality such as numeric fields, the reusable analysis API, payloads, near-realtime search, and transactional APIs for indexing and searching, and so on.

When Manning first approached me, it was clear that a second edition was sorely needed. Furthermore, as one of the active core committers largely responsible for committing so many of these changes, I felt rather obligated to create the second edition. So I said yes, and then worked fiendishly to cover Lucene’s changes, and I’m quite happy with the results. I hope this Second Edition of Lucene in Action will serve you well as you create your search applications, and I look forward to seeing you on the user and developer lists, asking your own interesting questions, and continuing to drive Lucene’s relentless growth!

MICHAEL MCCANDLESS