This isn’t a post about the philosophical reasoning that lead the Lucene.Net
developers to go commercial. It is a post about how they are going about it.
I happen to be involved in a project right now that I desperately wanted
Lucene.Net for, and was shocked when I found that I could no longer get it. OK, fine,
I will go pull the demo of SearchBlackBox and recommend we make the purchase.
I figured this will be good. Since the product is now commercial, the development
team will have good documentation and examples and a good explanation of the underlying
architecture of the application.
Yeah right.
As far as I can tell, the only thing that has been done to add
value to the commercial product is changing the namespace structure. Based
on the documentation, I have no idea how to build my index to accomplish my goals,
or what Reader to use when querying. These are simple implementation details
that are expected in any decent commercial software.
Guys, if you are going commercial, you must immediately add value to
the product offering and be professional about your documentation. The generic
sample apps are woefully inadequate.