For part one, click here…
What do they have in common and what makes them different?
Even though it’s hard to come up with a comparison table between all four alternatives, mainly because I can’t claim to have personal experience with all of them, the Internet has a lot of information on the subject, so I went ahead and did a bit of research on the matter.
Another point of interest to consider is that though on the long run, all four solutions provide very similar services; they do it a bit differently, since they can be categorized into two places:
- Full text search servers: They provide a finished solution, ready for the developers to install and interact with. You don’t have to integrate them into your application; you only have to interact with them. In here we have Solr and Sphinx.
- Full text search APIs: They provide the functionalities needed by the developer, but at a lower level. You’ll need to integrate these APIs into your application, instead of just consuming it’s services through a standard interface (like what happens with the servers). In here, we have the Lucene Project and the Xapian project.
Taking all of this into account, we can now proceed into a more in-depth discussion about our options:
