Plucene - A Perl port of the Lucene search engine

        my $doc = Plucene::Document->new;
        $doc->add(Plucene::Document::Field->Text(content => $content));
        $doc->add(Plucene::Document::Field->Text(author => "Your Name"));

        my $analyzer = Plucene::Analysis::SimpleAnalyzer->new();
        my $writer = Plucene::Index::Writer->new("my_index", $analyzer, 1);

        $writer->add_document($doc);
        undef $writer; # close

Search by building a Query

        my $parser = Plucene::QueryParser->new({
                analyzer => Plucene::Analysis::SimpleAnalyzer->new(),
                default  => "text" # Default field for non-specified queries
        });
        my $query = $parser->parse('author:"Your Name"');

Then pass the Query to an IndexSearcher and collect hits

        my $searcher = Plucene::Search::IndexSearcher->new("my_index");

        my @docs;
        my $hc = Plucene::Search::HitCollector->new(collect => sub {
                my ($self, $doc, $score) = @_;
                push @docs, $searcher->doc($doc);
        });

        $searcher->search_hc($query => $hc);

Plucene is a fully-featured and highly customizable search engine toolkit based on the Lucene API. (<http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene>)

It is not, in and of itself, a functional search engine - you are expected to subclass and tie all the pieces together to suit your own needs. The synopsis above gives a rough indication of how to use the engine in simple cases. See Plucene::Simple for one example of tying it all together.

The tests shipped with Plucene provide a variety of other examples of how use this.

Plucene comes shipped with some default Analyzers. However it is expected that users will want to create Analyzers to meet their own needs. To avoid namespace corruption, anyone releasing such Analyzers to CPAN (which is encouraged!) should place them in the namespace Plucene::Plugin::Analyzer::.

Although most of the Perl modules should be well documented, the Perl API mirrors Lucene's to such an extent that reading Lucene's documentation will give you a good idea of how to do more advanced stuff with Plucene. See particularly the ONJava articles <http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/01/15/lucene.html> and <http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/03/05/lucene.html>. These are brilliant introductions to the concepts surrounding Lucene, how it works, and how to extend it.

For the most part Lucene and Plucene indexes are created in the same manner. However, due to current implementation details, the indexes will generally not be compatible. It should theoretically be possible to convert index files in either direction between Plucene and Lucene, but no tools are currently provided to do so.

As Plucene is still undergoing development, we cannot guarantee index format compatibility across releases. If you're using Plucene in production code, you need to ensure that you can recreate the indexes.

The following features have not yet been fully implemented:

•

Wildcard searches

•

Range searches

Bug reports, patches, queries, discussion etc should be addressed to the mailing list. More information on the list can be found at:

<http://www.kasei.com/mailman/listinfo/plucene>

Initially ported by Simon Cozens and Marc Kerr.

Currently maintained by Tony Bowden and Marty Pauley.

Original Java Lucene by Doug Cutting and others.

The initial development and ongoing maintenance of Plucene has been funded and supported by Kasei <http://www.kasei.com/>

This software is licensed under the same terms as Perl itself.