Recently upgraded a 3-year old app from Lucene 2.1-dev to 3.0.1.

Some random thoughts to the evolution of the Lucene API over the past 3 years:

I miss Hits

Sigh. Hits has been deprecated for awhile now, but with 3.0 its gone. And I have to say its a pain that it is.

Where I used to pass the Hits object around, now I need to pass TopDocs AND Searcher in order to get to documents.

Instead of

Document doc = hits.doc(i);

its now

Document doc = searcher.doc(topdocs.scoreDocs[i].doc);

Much more verbose with zero benefit to me as a programmer.

Nice number indexing via NumericField

Where I previously had to pad numbers for lexicographic searching, there's now a proper NumericField and NumericRangeFilter.

Lockless commits

What more can I say? Yay!!

What has not changed…

Perhaps somewhat more important than what has changed, is what has remained the same, which is 95% of the API and the query language.

3 years is a mighty long time and Lucene has experienced explosive growth during this period. The overall sanity of change is a clear sign of Lucene's committers' dedication to simplicity and a hat-tip to Doug's original architecture and vision.

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