[Catalyst] Swish-e

[Graham Stead]

Depending on your needs, I'd like to make a plug for using Solr as your
search engine. Solr presents a nice XML front-end (and adds several fancy
features) to Lucene. The developer communities for Solr and Lucene are large
and active. These projects are used as production search engines on many
sites. A number of large sites have recently replaced their legacy search
engines with Solr and/or Lucene.

We use Catalyst and an internally developed Net::Solr module for custom
search applications. If you don't want to roll your own XML support, I can
make Net::Solr available to interested parties. I would need some help
getting it ready for community use, but I could also open source it.

If you have serious, production search needs, I suggest at least
familiarizing yourself with Solr's capabilities (including caching, faceted
search, function queries, DisMax, etc.). There can be a short learning curve
to setting it up, especially if you've never run a JVM before. If you want
something quick and dirty, Kino or other systems may take less time in the
short term.

Hope this helps,
-Graham