Chapter 13. Don’t reinvent the wheel
This chapter covers
- Term highlighters
- The BoostingQuery class
- Synonym generation and regex queries
- Extracting and indexing text from different file formats
In this final chapter we’re going to look at some of the non-core contributions to Lucene made by developers and interested parties who want to see additional functionality in the product. The authors almost guarantee that one of these libraries will save you time and work in one of your projects.
The Apache Lucene website maintains links to a Lucene Sandbox of contributions that are free to use (within licensing restrictions), open source offerings at http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/lucene-sandbox/index.html, and third-party contributions at http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/contributions.html, not all of which are open source or free. Some open source libraries not mentioned on the Lucene website can also help out tremendously depending on the situation. We’ll be discussing one of these. You’ve used several of these contributions before.
Remember the MoreLikeThis class in chapter 12? In addition, you’ve been using the index examiner application Luke throughout this book, and we’ll continue to use it in this chapter.