In this section we walk through the sources behind the basic Lucene demo such as where to find it, its parts and their function. This section is intended for Java developers wishing to understand how to use Apache Lucene in their applications.

Relative to the directory created when you extracted Lucene or retreived it from Subversion, you should see a directory called "src" which in turn contains a directory called "demo". This is the root for all of the Lucene demos. Under this directory is org/apache/lucene/demo, this is where all the Java sources live.

Within this directory you should see the IndexFiles class we executed earlier. Bring that up in vi or your alternative text editor and lets take a look at it.

As we discussed in the previous walkthrough, the IndexFiles class creates a Lucene Index. Lets take a look at how it does this.

The first substantial thing the main function does is instantiate an instance of IndexWriter. It passes a string called "index" and a new instance of a class called "StandardAnalyzer". The "index" string is the name of the directory that all index information should be stored in. Because we're not passing any path information, one must assume this will be created as a subdirectory of the current directory (if it does not already exist). On some platforms this may actually result in it being created in other directories (such as the user's home directory).

The IndexWriter is the main class responsible for creating indicies. To use it you must instantiate it with a path that it can write the index into, if this path does not exist it will create it, otherwise it will refresh the index living at that path. You must a also pass an instance of org.apache.lucene.analysis.Analyzer.

The Analyzer, in this case, the StandardAnalyzer is little more than a standard Java Tokenizer, converting all strings to lowercase and filtering out useless words and characters from the index. By useless words and characters I mean common language words such as articles (a, an, the, etc.) and other strings that would be useless for searching (e.g. 's) . It should be noted that there are different rules for every language, and you should use the proper analyzer for each. Lucene currently provides Analyzers for English and German, more can be found in the Lucene Sandbox.

Looking down further in the file, you should see the indexDocs() code. This recursive function simply crawls the directories and uses FileDocument to create Document objects. The Document is simply a data object to represent the content in the file as well as its creation time and location. These instances are added to the indexWriter. Take a look inside FileDocument. It's not particularly complicated, it just adds fields to the Document.

As you can see there isn't much to creating an index. The devil is in the details. You may also wish to examine the other samples in this directory, particularly the IndexHTML class. It is a bit more complex but builds upon this example.

The SearchFiles class is quite simple. It primarily collaborates with an IndexSearcher, StandardAnalyzer (which is used in the IndexFiles class as well) and a QueryParser. The query parser is constructed with an analyzer used to interperate your query in the same way the Index was interperated: finding the end of words and removing useless words like 'a', 'an' and 'the'. The Query object contains the results from the QueryParser which is passed to the searcher. The searcher results are returned in a collection of Documents called "Hits" which is then iterated through and displayed to the user.

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